Be An Active Participant

As Kate mentioned, we have found some issues with the construction of our house. Nothing major, and nothing that hasn't been immediately and graciously handled by Church Hill Homes. In fact the lessons that come from this are worth far more then any detailed explanation of what we noticed:

1. It's your house - take an active role in making it what you really want. This absolutely includes watching the construction as often as you can (without getting in anyone's way of course!) Only by keeping an eye out on all steps of the construction process will you catch problems and avoid (almost) all misunderstandings. And things found early are generally easily corrected, or a solution can be found that will satisfy everyone, as some changes are unavoidable.


2. Be flexible. In our case, if construction had been completed without changes I would still be very pleased with the house. That's because we had chosen several things that we really cared about and made sure those things were understood by everyone at the start to be high priority items. For other things we can tolerate a fair amount of variability, and we make it clear that the builders can do whatever makes the most sense to them.


3. There's a saying somewhere that I can't recall but will paraphrase: It is easy to look good when everything is going well. True character is shown by how things are handled when everything isn't completely smooth. I will continue to keep a close eye on construction, but I have full confidence in the integrity of Church Hill Homes.