One year list countdown is on / about cars and houses
As our one year anniversary in this Mattamy home approaches, I am
struggeling scrambling to bring together our 1 year list of items to fix. One year
also was enough time to partially adjust my attitude and accept some of
the shortcomings of human nature (or should I say builders?).
I guess unfortunately it has to be considered normal that something new
you buy, be it a house, be it a car – is going to be flawed – no matter
how much you pay for it. Sounds like a weird thing to accept.
Mattamy boasts in their homeowner manual that they want every home they
build to be the best home they build. Well, I guess the only way to
assure this would be a in-depth quality assurance process of their
contractor’s work in every home – which I would say, did not take place
in our case.
But the new car industry is similar, as I just had to read in the paper the other day
(a study by J.D. Power and Associates). The quality of workmanship
during car assembly seems partially to be measured by how many cars out
of a 100 come back for some small repair or complaint within the first
90 days of ownership. And guess what, if for example 91 cars out of the
100 are back in the store within the first 90 days, it is considered a good rating! I could hardly believe this.
I this really an acceptable level of problems? Are those really the
type of ‘quality’ and high price items we want to spend our money on?