Builders are awful.

Well, specifically, my builder, or rather, the company that built my house and the shitty contractors they hired. IN MY OPINION (I have to say that, or else I'll get in trouble), Torrey Homes is shit. They got bought by DR Horton a few years ago, but I'm still paying for the mistakes they made when they built my house in 1998. The latest thing:

My wife calls me at lunch and freaks out because there is water dripping from our ceiling (at least it wasn't blood). We had a bad storm last night, and I was hoping we didn't have a frigging tree brach shot through our roof. So I drive home, go up in the attic, root around for a while, then discover the culprit--the upstairs A/C unit. You see, when you install an A/C unit, you're also supposed to put a drip pan underneath the unit itself. This helps out if the unit starts leaking or dripping from too much condensation. There's a little switch in the pan that shuts the unit down if the water level gets too high. Well, you see what the geniuses that installed our units did, on the 2nd unit (for the upstairs), they put a drip pan underneath the unit that's about 80% the size of the bottom of the unit. It should be underneath the entire unit, like our downstairs A/C is. But, since they didn't do that, the edge that is leaking is not over the drip pan, so now there's been water drizzling down on my ceiling for who knows how long now, causing 2 wet spots that mean we'll also have to repair the ceiling as well as the A/C unit itself. I'll probably do the ceiling work myself, since it's just sheetrock, but I wouldn't have to, if the original band of morons would have done the work they were supposed to do. Fuckers. And the company I called to do it (whom I trust, as I know the owner) I'm having to pay overtime to come today, as opposed to when they could first get to it, which would be Monday. And if you've never been to Atlanta in the summer...let's just say it gets a tad warm here.

It's actually not too much more for overtime, and the unit itself is leaking. Plus, as I said, the heat is pretty bad right now--we keep getting these nasty thunderstorms at night. So, it gets up in the high 80s/low 90s during the day, and the humidity stays around 95% too, so it's just nasty. Our A/C conked out about 2 years ago upstairs around August, and it was terrible. We had to sleep downstairs, because even with all the windows open at night, the temp still wouldn't go below 85 or so in the upstairs. I actually sent my wife and our son (who was about 1 at the time) to my parent's house because the house would never cool down and he was miserable. I hung around waiting for the A/C guys to come fix the thing, which they did.

Not 7 years later. I actually did send them an e-mail, though.

Got the problem fixed last night. Actually only cost $150 for everything (I was expecting like $400-$500), as the guy was only there for about an hour total. Apparently the drip pan has a hole in it somewhere, but it's a bear to replace (like a 3-4 person job, as you have to get 2 people to hold up the unit while someone else replaces the pan), so he fixed where the unit was leaking, and we dried up the rest of the stuff as best as possible. And the ceiling drippage wasn't so bad since we caught it early, so we'll just spray some "Kilz" on the spots after they completely dry up to get rid of the stain.