Hello,
I'm Julie McAdoo and I live in a home with Chinese drywall with my husband and two young daughters. We are starting the remediation of our home this week and acting as our own contractors. If you live in a home with Chinese drywall or are just interested in the plight of the Chinese drywall homeowner, then read on, and I'll fill you in on the background as well as the progress we make in getting this fixed.
First the history...
The Air Force moved us to sunny Tampa, Florida in the summer of 2008. After much searching with a cranky 2 year old, we found our dream home in a quiet neighborhood in South Tampa. We had looked and looked for weeks before we found it. When we toured the home for the first time we were bowled over by two things, the beauty of the home and an awful stench throughout the home. We asked our realtor about it, and he thought it was probably due to dry traps in the plumbing allowing sewer gasses into the home--a common problem in homes that have sat unoccupied for a year. Sounded plausible to us. In 2008, no one really knew about Chinese drywall or the sulphur stench it emits.
That first summer, our downstairs air conditioning coil failed and was replaced at our builder's expense because it was still under the home's 1 year warranty. As the weather cooled, the stench started to subside and I had almost forgotten about it until the next summer (2009) when our upstairs air conditioning coil failed! This time the coil was still under its warranty, but we had to pay for labor as it was one month past our 1 year home warranty expired. So $400 later, I was wondering if we needed to find a new brand of air conditioner. About six weeks later our downstairs coil failed again, but I let it go because the weather was starting to cool and I figured the girls and I could make it through the winter without it (husband was deployed).
I didn't have any notion that the failing air conditioning coils were due to Chinese drywall until about January/February 2010 when my husband's Commander asked me to look into the subject to help another family in the unit that had Chinese drywall. As soon as I read that two of the biggest indicators were the sulphur stench and constantly failing air conditioning coils, I was pretty sure that we had it too.
I called the home inspector that did out inspection to buy the house. He was so kind to come out and look for some of the tell-tale signs. Sure enough, when he opened up the air conditioning coil in the garage, the coil was absolutely black. It's supposed to be copper--shiny like a newly minted penny. He gave me some leads to find out more, so I started investigating. I even called out the dogs to sniff out the drywall! The human who accompanied the dog also confirmed we had it by looking at the outlet copper ground wires which were all corroded too.
After a lot of soul searching, we decided to report the drywall to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Property Tax Appriaser, and a lawfirm to represent us. The reason for so much soul searching was our concern over what having a 'tainted' home would do to its market value and resale value. But in the end, we decided that if the responsible parties were ever going to have to pay for their mistake, we wanted to be able to recover damages. Had we not reported anything, we still would be out the money for the renovation, but with no hope to recover damages.
I'll write more about all the trials and tribulations that got us to this point, but primarily, I want to share this remediation process. We aren't speculators snatching cheap Chinese drywall homes to flip, we're homeowners forced to live with the poor decisions of others. But we're not victims either. Rather than let this ruin us, we're fighting back. We aren't made of money, so we're taking this project on ourselves. We're hiring subcontractors to do the job right and saving a bundle over hiring a general contractor. I hope you don't find yourself in this same situation, but if you do, and want to fix it, and have the means to do so, I'm going to share with you my experiences and hopefully my success!
