Day 82 - Punch List, Generous Pour, and PM Hookups

Last night I sent our PM a quick punch list of items I had noticed.

Most were minor issues, or paint related (underside of 2nd floor foyer window unpainted, etc).

He called me back today and said they are all being taken care of. He is writing up his punch list today and all of my items will be on there. There were a couple of items I wasn't sure on, but he said

they would hook me up anyway. He's installing windowsills in the garage, but won't paint them. Cutting down the toilet drain in the roughed-in bathroom and installing a flange (not part of the deal, but easy/cheap for them to do, and probably a PITA for me to do).

Lastly is the driveway... Very happy about this one. The back story is that on the pre-con site plan it had a straight line drive, so basically 30x30. PM caught this, and scribbled the change on our pre-con site plan. That left the garage (3 car, side entry) as 30' wide but tapered down to 20' before it hit the sidewalk, and then the entry part is also 20' wide. Apparently that correction never made it to the actual site plan, so the concrete guys setup the forms with a 30' wide drive the whole way to the street. It looks much better this way, and avoids a hard turn to pull into the 3rd car garage, but that extra concrete costs so extra $$ (~$1k I would guess) so I figured they would catch it eventually.

Fast forward to today's phone call. PM said he was upstairs working on the punch list, noticed they had started pouring and instantly saw what was wrong. Ran down and the concrete guys said "it's exactly like on the site plan", which it was. And it was basically too late to change it. I told him obviously we preferred it that way, so there is no issue. He said he figured as much. I believe his quote was "you're out here every day so I knew if it was an issue you would have seen it and said something..." which is a pretty true statement.

The way I see this unexpected bonus is it evens out some other issues I have noticed (like a wall or 2 not being drywalled square) but bit my tongue on. You let some of the small stuff go and you get some good karma coming your way in the form of a few hundred extra square feet of concrete. Another point to bring up with future or early builders is how you interact with your PM. I have admittedly been very hand on during this whole build, but I always have maintained a good relationship with our PM and trusted his judgement on most things. I haven't emailed him daily with issues, but tried to consolidate a list, give him a chance to notice/fix first, and then emailed after a bit. And I really don't expect him to notice everything I will notice. I have 1 house to focus on, so I can get very detailed -- he has probably 4 to 6 at the same time, so his focus is different. My point is that I think maintaining a good attitude and relationship with your PM (and letting some small stuff slide) pays off in the end. I really doubt he would do little things like windowsills and toilet flanges if I was a pain the entire time. Difficult customers get the "what you ordered and nothing more"

We have a sidewalk and gutters now!

Got lucky with the extra wide driveway.

Sidewalk stops about 4' short of property line

Mailbox just appeared

Gutters today too...

Celebrating the official closing of our OLD house today.