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::: COMMUNITY NEWS
South developer Reynen & Bardis is addressing foundation problems
in
17 homes Published Monday, January 12, 2004 Five days before Christmas a year ago, the Telford-McGuire family took possession of their newly built home in Murieta South. They had looked forward to this moment for more than a year. Even though there was no furniture, that didn't keep them from spending their first night there. The happy occasion was also the first birthday of their youngest child. Almost a year later, as Matt McGuire looked at the picture he took that night of his wife and their three children on the floor in sleeping bags and comforters, he talked about other pictures he has taken since. They're pictures of cracks that developed in the downstairs rooms of their home soon after they moved in. Cracks that grow wider during the rainy months and led the couple to seek answers for what was happening to the home they had dreamed of and worked for, the place where they planned to raise their children.
Their research has convinced them that the slab foundation of their home has been affected by the type of soil it rests on. They now know they aren't the only South homeowners dealing with the problem of Ione clay, an extremely expansive soil common to this area, which can cause movement in foundations and lead to cracked walls and uneven floors. For the past few years, South developer Reynen & Bardis has made repairs, bought back homes and changed the type of foundation it uses to address problems with subsidence, the technical name for the settling of the foundations. Since 2000, the company has built 205 production homes in Units 7, 8, and 9 on the South, according to Rancho Murieta Association records. Right now the company is working with 17 homes that are having problems with cracking, according to Francis Furtado, the president of home-building operations for Reynen & Bardis. Many of the problems have occurred in homes along Murieta South Parkway, he said last week. Not all the homes on Furtado's list have serious settlement issues, he said. "Some have a fair degree of settlement and others have just normal settling," he said. The homes are categorized accordingly. He characterized six on the list as being critical and five as having moderate problems. He said the concern about subsidence problems in the development was brought to his attention when he started with Reynen & Bardis last March. "It's a major headache," he acknowledged in an interview last fall. "I've been in this business for 28 years, with Elliot Homes for 25, and I've never experienced a problem like this before. It's unusual. But, you know, when it comes to homebuilding, everything can be fixed. It can be painful, but everything can be fixed."
He described the problem as "pockets of expansive material reacting to excess moisture, causing some movement in the foundations. … In the beginning, when our warranty department first started to experience this, I think they were a little bit lost in how to remedy it, and the magnitude of it." Some South homeowners contacted by RanchoMurieta.com have been reluctant to speak publicly about any problems. They have not taken any collective action. But McGuire and his wife, Melissa Telford, have gone public with their frustrations. "You wait so long and you're so excited. … Then you move in and your dream crumbles," Telford said in December. "All my neighbors are decorating and doing their yards. We can't do anything." Last fall, McGuire set up a web site, www.randbhomes.org, that detailed his dissatisfaction with the developer. It included pictures he has taken of cracks in the walls of his home. He briefly took the site down after Reynen & Bardis threatened legal action, but recently returned it to the Internet. The site also appears under the name reynenandbardissucks.com. The Telford-McGuire home is not one of the 17 homes on Furtado's list. It is covered by a separate homebuilder's warranty, Furtado said, because it has a different kind of foundation. "If there's any structural deficiencies, then the warranty company is responsible for that," Furtado said. "We had them come out, they inspected it, and they basically wrote a report saying they did not feel the house had any structural deficiencies, that it was strictly cosmetic and caused by minor settling. "... Out here, because other people have a bigger problem, a lot of people see normal cracking and think, oh, my God, it's happening to me, and it's not," Furtado said. "It's just normal settlement and you can't confuse the two issues. You have to take them on a case-by-case basis. "What's happening is the sheet rock -- that's the weakest part of the house -- it's giving, it comes apart and you have to go in and you have to repair it. If the cracking was to continue and it didn't stabilize, then you'd have to take a different approach." The company has switched to a post-tension foundation in the past two years because it is recommended for use on expansive clay soils. In this process, cables are built into the slab and then tightened to strengthen the foundation by compressing it. "It's helped tremendously," Furtado said. "That is the foundation we feel is best for the subdivision."
The Telford-McGuire home on Abierto Drive is built on a post-tension foundation. As the months passed after they moved in, the couple became increasingly frustrated with the developer for characterizing the home's problems as cosmetic. They hired soil engineer Youngdahl Consulting Group to perform a geo-technical evaluation of their home. The report Youngdahl prepared for them in July said the home has suffered "severe foundation movement" due to the shrinking and swelling of the underlying soil. According to Youngdahl's floor level survey, one end of the home had lifted 1 1/2 inches. The report noted that the un-landscaped backyard had "very poor drainage" and "wallboard cracks that were most severe in April have decreased with drying of the soil." Paul Gumbinger, the president of the Rancho Murieta Association and a homeowner on Murieta South Parkway, was told the same thing by the Youngdahl engineer after Reynen & Bardis hired the firm to evaluate homes experiencing subsidence problems. Gumbinger and his wife, Louise, moved into their home about two years ago. Their previous home in Murieta South was on Zancada Court. That house had no cracks, Gumbinger said, but their new home had problems almost from the start. The home is the same model as the Telford-McGuire home, although the Gumbinger home has the earlier type of slab foundation used in the development, not a post-tension foundation. Gumbinger said cracks in the walls have been repaired numerous times by the builder, but they always come back. At one point, when a corner of the garage began to sink, Reynen & Bardis replaced the garage floor and poured a concrete trench 20 feet long and three feet wide under one wall to correct the problem, he said. While the problem with the garage was noticeable, Gumbinger, a semi-retired architect, was surprised to learn that the breakfast room floor, located at one end of the house, varies by three inches from the living room floor, located at the other end. This came to light when Youngdahl did a floor level survey.
The couple has put plans for additional landscaping on hold until the drainage issue is addressed. In the side yard, a model train set awaits the day when Gumbinger can build a garden railroad and pursue a hobby in model railroading. "A lot of people are very angry with Reynen & Bardis, but Reynen & Bardis is doing everything they can to correct this," Gumbinger said last fall. "… It's just the nature of the soil and they weren't aware of it. It's costing them a lot more to correct these problems. They have a good reputation to protect. … No builder wants this kind of problem. "Houses don't go together like Swiss watches," he added. "The soil in this one particular area is the culprit." Last week, Louise Gumbinger characterized the problem as "a couple cracks that keep coming back. It's not that big of a deal. I have no complaints. They're doing the best they can." Her husband said Reynen & Bardis is making a "good faith offer to resolve" the issue and he feels there is "enough protection under law to insure it gets done. … It's going to be a major undertaking." The legal protection Gumbinger was referring to is SB800, a bill that went into effect in 2003. The bill covers most construction defects in new homes for a period of 10 years and gives builders the opportunity to fix any defects before a lawsuit can be filed. "I look forward to having a house that is level," he remarked. Last fall, the Gumbingers received a letter from Reynen & Bardis containing a form assessing the condition of their home, a remediation plan and an extended warranty from the builder to correct problems caused by subsidence. Furtado explained, "We've extended the (homebuilder) warranties on some of the houses so that they feel secure that we're not just going to put a band-aid on this thing. We're trying to handle this the most professional way we know and that's the way we're doing it. We're taking it on a case-by-case basis. We've turned our back on no one." A few months ago, Reynen & Bardis contacted Melissa Telford and Matt McGuire's lawyer about buying back their house, Telford said. "We just decided it would be in everybody's best interests to just buy it back," Furtado acknowledged last week. "Basically, the offer was let us fix it or let us buy it back. We're not really interested in doing a trade. ... We're at a standstill right now." Furtado said the offer to fix the home's problems still stands. "Just let us come in, we'll use our consultants and do what's right to get it fixed. (Matt McGuire) has not given us the OK to do that." "I just want them to fix the house," said McGuire. "We tried to find comparable lots. The problem is they've decreased the size of their lots quite a bit. … We're really not willing to move outside the community. We didn't just buy the house. We bought the community." Like many Murietans, the couple has relatives here. They were sold on the community after visiting family on the Fourth of July and other occasions. "People didn't know us, but they waved. It was nice. We just really liked it," said McGuire. "We wanted to do the Murieta wave too. Our plan was to get here. I'm not giving up the community." Ed Mickiewicz and his wife, Lorraine Thompson, feel the same way. "I couldn't find nicer neighbors than what I have here," said Mickiewicz, who was also offered a buy-out but turned it down. "I would be very sad if we had to move," said his wife as she looked around the comfortable family room of their home on the 7th hole of the South Course. They live across the street from the Gumbingers on Murieta South Parkway. "Most people want to stay there," said Furtado. "They want us to go in and do the remediation work, so that's what we're doing." Last fall, Reynen & Bardis moved the couple into a model home while extensive work was done on their home. "We gave them a list of things and they agreed to repair them," said Mickiewicz. The repairs included replacing the wallboard in most rooms, fixing cracks in the slab, and replacing carpeting. The exterior of the home was repainted with a special elastic paint after cracks in the stucco were repaired. A drainage system recommended by Youngdahl was installed around the house, which necessitated replacement of the lawn. The builder has promised to plant shrubs in the spring to replace the ones lost to trenching. When they moved back into their home around Thanksgiving, one of the crew helped them re-hang their drapes. "They're trying very hard to take care of the problems," said Thompson. "Time will tell." They bought the home about three and a half years ago. Problems gradually surfaced after the first year. At one point, the driveway was replaced. "It's kind of a surprise to move into a new house and have these problems," remarked Thompson. "We didn't want to sue. Let them fix the house, that's the way to do it." Over the last few years, they've seen some neighbors accept buy-outs and they've seen numerous homes being worked on along their stretch of the Parkway. They have also noticed that a house could have problems and the one next door would be fine, something Melissa Telford and Matt McGuire have also noted. As Youngdahl engineers wrote in the report on the Telford-McGuire home, "Our understanding of the area is that the expansive nature of soils is highly variable and can range from low to extreme. We have experienced this degree of variation to occur within a single lot in this area." Since some of their neighbors' homes are going through the repair process theirs went through, Mickiewicz commented, "Nowadays when we greet each other, we don't say, 'How are you?' We say, 'How's your house?' … I think they're really trying to address the problems." "It's not about things being done wrong," Furtado said. "It's strictly Mother Nature here is not being very nice to us, and that's kind of what it comes down to. Soil conditions most of the time are predictable but sometimes they can be a little unpredictable, and that's kind of what's happening here. … "We don't want people to end up with an investment that at some point is going to lose value. We can't do that. We're there to make sure we figure out this problem." Reynen & Bardis is currently building the Crest subdivision. Another new subdivision, the Greens, is being built by Corinthian Homes, which is affiliated with Reynen & Bardis. These two subdivisions will total about 180 units. Furtado said the problems the company is working to resolve have had no effect on new home sales in the South -- there is a waiting list of buyers. He said new homeowners are being made aware of drainage issues and are cautioned to make sure water drains away from their homes when they install backyard landscaping. The front yards are landscaped by the builder. "We're motivated to cross the t's and dot the i's to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said. "We probably can't come out of this as knights in shining armor for everybody, but we're going to try."
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