The tile grout was disintegrating along with my patience

Sorry I disappeared. I lost my sanity (and maybe my temper). The building process was fun and enjoyable for the first 12 months. Then it wasn't. It wasn't fun at all. It was horrible. We were originally supposed to be in in late November or early December. Ha. Not even close. As the holidays came closer my frustrations grew. I was OK waiting as long as I knew the quality of the house was worth waiting for. As the tile went in I became very nervous. The quality was horrible. I was there twice a day freaking out. The grout lines were terrible, the caulking was the wrong color, the tile was chipped and crooked, the shower niches had exposed tile edges and were slanted so far things fell right off and the grout in the kitchen was mixed improperly so that when you rubbed your finger along it it dissolved like sand and left a pile on the counters. As it disintegrated so did my patience.Also in the downstairs guest room the whole shower sat crooked. The walls had been level so they said it was the tiling. How does that even happen?

I spoke with the project manager from Toll who agreed that it was horrible. He actually said "this is shit." I appreciated his honesty. The tile guys came back. And came back again. And came back again. And again. The master shower was redone 6 times. The butlers pantry finally was changed from a tile backsplash to running marble up the wall. They just couldn't get the tile to line up straight. It was subway tile. How hard could it have been when tile is your job?! I finally demanded a new tile company and all our problems were solved.

The tile concerned me enough that I literally went through the entire house inch by inch to find everything that needed to be addressed. I found two weird pipes sticking out of walls. One outside on the back porch (with a dangerous looking rebar attached to it) and one in the upstairs guest room. The number of people that would have had to ignore these pipes is mind boggling. We're talking drywall, trim, paint, plumbing etc. But there they were.

Also every piece of marble had been scratched. Toll left them uncovered and the hardwood floor guys used the kitchen islands as a work bench for their table saw. I had pictures of them doing this. The cabinets had also been pretty beat up. Essentially everything we paid upgrade charges for were not taken care of by Toll and their subs.

The marble was taken out, and I was told it would be replaced with new marble. When it was reinstalled I went to look. They actually had only filled the nail holes and buffed it out. It was the same piece of marble. You could see the same marks. I was furious. I had not paid what we paid for upgrade charges for refurbished marble.

The stone looked great on the outside of the house but they forgot to add the stucco surrounds to the window. Just plain forgot. I was out of town and didn't see it for a week so you can imagine my surprise. Toll claimed that it was only an oral discussion to add those, but, that was a lie. We wrote it on the red line plans and I signed them back in January. They managed to lose those plans, but I had pictures of them and our old project manager who left confirmed that I was telling the truth. The only way to fix it was to rip off the stone around the windows and re do it. I offered to add shutters first to see if that would soften the stone enough. I tried to work with them. I really did. After 5 sets of shutters that were all either the wrong shape or size I was so frustrated.

The last straw was when I went into another Toll Brothers Merida plan in another neighborhood. The dining room seemed substantially smaller than my dining room. Initially, that was the one room where the size concerned me when I saw the plans, but I was assured it would work. Out came my measuring tape that traveled with me everywhere at this point in the build. Sure enough I was missing feet- not inches- feet off my dining room. I went upstairs, and I'm also missing feet from the bedroom up there. When they framed the foyer and had issues with extra space on the right side (see a previous post about that) they assured me they "checked every measurement twice and everything was spot on." They lied. This was also the reason Lauren lost half of her closet and linen closet to HVAC because they did not have the space they needed to run it where it should have been in the plans. I was out feet of usable space. This missing square footage didn't show up anywhere else in the house to make up for it either. When I brought this to Toll Brothers attention they told me I didn't have plans with the exact measurements. That wasn't true. I took pics of my exact plans in the sales office one day. They didn't know I had those. They measured for themselves and tried to say "well it is what it is." Even though the base price is set according to square footage they told us tough.

I was done at this point. I decided that day that I was going to make them rip the stone off and redo it with the stucco surround that was supposed to be there. I started looking at other houses, and I went to the head of Toll Brothers in Texas. I wasn't sure at this point that I was ever going to live in this house. We had several calm, rational and productive conversations with David from Toll Texas. I was quite proud of myself. At the end of the day they gave us a credit for the missing square footage along with a few other things that were still unsatisfactory, and we agreed to move forward. I'm so glad we did. Now.

Would I build again? Yes. But with a custom home builder and not a big box builder. Toll does not use quality subs, and the project managers have little to no control over those subs. I would not build with Toll again. It was not just the mistakes and the poor quality but the constant out right lies that turned the page for me. We had a few more issues after we moved in that I'll share in another post for another day. This is enough complaining for one day!

#Toll #tollbrothers #tile #grout #mortar #caulk #pipe #mistakes