Complaint Review: Jim Walter Homes

This is quite a long story, but you would have to read it all to understand what we went through.

My wife and I purchased a Jim Walter Home (JWH) in April of 2006.

While we were still in the phases of choosing our floor plan, We narrowed it down to two choices, The Eastland model or the Cameron. We decided on the Cameron despite the fact that we were a little uncomfortable with the price.

Our sales person came up with an idea of us choosing the President II model (which has the same footprint, but less expensive) but build the Cameron interior walls. for the same price as a President II (about a $6,000 savings). To make a long story short, After some research, David Hite, our sales manager, said that the interior load bearing walls were different and it could not be done.

We saw his point and proceeded with the Cameron anyway.
Right before construction began, David asked us if we were opposed to having our house panelized...(built off site, and trucked to job site in peices). I didn't want to, but said ok because David said it would speed up the process, and he will ad a truss floor system at no charge in place of the standard beams.

Contruction went underway within one week of our conversation.

Our cameron was built in 8 days! We were happy, David told me that since we are panelizing and using the truss floor system, we are getting lots of national attention from JWH big wigs because our house is the 1st one in Texas to be built this way.

The President of the company and 5 Regional managers were all out at the job site and my wife and I had the chance to meet every one of them.

Everything was going good, until one day, during construction, I noticed that the interior load bearing walls were spaced at 24"on center, but the should have been on 16" centers as per our contract.

I asked Jason Maddox, one of the Managers from somewhere, why this was like this. He said, "With a truss system, you don't have interior load bearing walls." "You could essentially gut the entire house and have one huge room and it wouldn't make a difference, all of the weight is distributed to the outside walls."
Once I learned this, I mad a phone call to David and said, We could have had the President II built anyway, it wouldn't have made a difference. I wrote and email and left a voice mail to Jim Williamson, The President of the western division, I have yet to hear from him. I felt cheated and wanted some kind of compensation, 6 thousand dollars is a lot of money, especially if you calculate the interest over 30 years...(about 18000 dollars)

After some time passed, I realized I would never see anything from this issue. So to salvage what I could, I called David and asked him if I could keep the material that was left on the job site, I told him that this would make me a happy customer.

He agreed and so I placed an ad on the internet to sell this extra material. The ad response was huge, I agreed to sell the material for $1100.00 to a man who responded. I called David to thank him. He said, "No problem, glad I could help.

By the way, How much material did you have?" I told him and he said, Oh I wasn't aware you had that much.....You can't have it. I was shocked. I Told David that a guy was coming to get the material tonight and he is giving me cash. David said he was sorry and that there was nothing more he could do. I got ripped off by JWH twice within one month!!

Mark
New Caney, Texas
U.S.A.