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In response to
"This might be a sore subject, but"
by
Strongbad
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Not a terribly sore subject. Now that time has passed, the wounds have scabbed over sufficiently. -- (edited)
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Essentially, a series of major screw-ups by the architects, followed by a moderate oversight by the contractor, have caused the delays.
The architects screwed up in a major way on their initial drawings and then also reviewing the formal engineering drawings and plans. The major feature of this ADU is that a steel moment frame supports the major portion of the house. The design is based around a longhouse / farmhouse style main room (composing the kitchen, dining, living, and utility areas) as a huge open space with no internal support. Everything rests on a steel frame that had to be fabricated, trucked in, and lifted over the main house with crane, then installed by a team of a dozen steelworkers.
The problem was that the architects missed a few key details such as making sure the bolts rising out of the footings matched the bolt holes in the base of the support. Our contractor spotted 7 such errors in the first engineering drawings that took them 2 months to correct.
Then, on the day before the damn thing was supposed to be installed -- and had already been fabricated and put on a truck, mind you -- the manager of the steelworking team pointed out that the plans they were given did not match the plans the contractor had. And the central beam, running down the center of that portion of the house, was 19 inches too short.
So, that was another 3-month delay of refabricating the entire steel frame from scratch and rescheduling everyone for the installation.
By that point, all of the subcontractors had given up. Every single one of them kept pointing out other minor errors the architects had made (e.g., placement of outlets, flashing around windows, radon remediation system) that kept causing delays of a few days to a week or two.
But we're not over the hump. There have been a couple minor -- but understandable and reasonable delays -- that pushed back the move in date from late November to mid-December, but everything now is solely under our contractor's control. And he's moving like gangbusters.
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