We were finally able to move into our new home. The 3 person crew from IndieDwell that had been living in an AirBnB in North Idaho for a month finally went home. There was a punch list though, so they were coming back. I sent the Punch List on June 30th. It was as follows:

Master Bathroom Shower Not Caulked: Top of insert
Master Bathroom Door Installed Incorrectly: Hinge side bow, top and right side rubbing, strikeplate misaligned
Flooring gives in multiple places: comes apart in hall way
Southern Container is unlevel: Inclined toward the interior - Approximately 1" over 4ft
Master Bathroom Mirror: Should there be one?
Master Bedroom Closet Panel: Needs Replaced
Master Bathroom Cabinet Broken and Puttied Over: Bottom Front Left
Master Bedroom Screen Missing
Dishwasher Cabinet Front Chipped
Bottom Corner Cabinet in Kitchen: No shelves
Top Corner Cabinet in Kitchen: No rear support
Missing Pegs For Cabinets
Main Bathroom Shower Valve installed backwards
Main Bathroom Medicine Cabinet Shelf Peg holes not aligned: Shelves won’t install flat
Oven drawer is bent and does not close correctly
Front outside electrical outlet and 2 outlets in 2nd bedroom not working
Mini-Split Wall Controller Not Installed
Mini-Split Handheld Remote Cradles Missing
Large disk lights flicker over Kitchen sink and in both baths

Most of these things were very minor. A couple were dealt with by the electrician and the HVAC contractor, and a couple of things I just fixed myself. However, for some of them materials needed to be delivered and/or work had to be done, so they scheduled to have a crew come up the week of August 10th. That’s right near our wedding anniversary so we decided to take a trip to the coast and let them do their thing.

We came back to most of the remaining issues fixed. There was one significant issue though: the flooring.

Our whole house was covered in a nice Shaw vinyl click-lock flooring, but there were several places that it didn’t feel firm - it was “squishy.” It was as if the subfloor was not level and the flooring would flex in the dip in the subfloor beneath. The crew from IndieDwell came in and replaced some of the flooring in the areas where the containers came together and, as I would find out later, just added a bunch of shims and scraps of flooring in order to firm it up. As you might expect, this didn’t solve the problem for long. The floor continue to flex under the pressure caused by four sets of feet and an uneven subfloor and over the next several months began to split.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t our only flooring problem. I was working on building bunk beds for our girls, but in the meantime they had their twin mattresses on the floor. Something one day led us to pick up and move the mattresses and we found mold growing underneath. Our high-end vinyl plank flooring, with all the manufactured texture of real wood, made it impossible to remove the mold from the floor without completely damaging it. So I began to take up the flooring in order to replace it.

When I found below was that the subfloor was covered in mold. Probably from the water damage from before we got the roof on. I scrubbed and painted over the mold with KILZ and prepped the subfloor to be covered with new flooring, which IndieDwell was kind enough to send me for free. However, when the 2 boxes arrived, they didn’t work. Shaw had increased the width of the product by about an 1/8th of an inch since our home was built (4 months earlier) and their new product wasn’t compatible with the old version.

I was told that this was a problem that was surfacing on another IndieDwell project, some college dorms they were building, so they were good about getting to the bottom of it. They were finally able to track down a couple boxes of the correct flooring which they sent me in September.

That didn’t stop the rest of the flooring issues though, which continued to get worse as time went on. Which is a story for our next installment.

Our IndieDwell Home, Part 3, or, Punch Me Right In The List