Here's a tortured tale of real estate hype and a buyer who got saddled with a 'new' home filled with shoddy workmanship

WHAT'S NEXT: Our new roof was completed last week by EMT Solar & Roofing of Cherry Hill in preparation for a new solar panel system that promises to zero out our electric bill year-round. Shoddy workmanship on the original roof left us with numerous leaks.

 The front door wasn't safe, 

the roof sprung many leaks, 

radiant heat left us shivering

EDITOR'S NOTE: If you're shopping for a home in Hackensack's Fairmount section, you should be aware of a big quality of life issue -- aircraft noise. You will be living under the flight paths of both Teterboro Airport and the international airport know as Newark Liberty.

 

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

HACENSACK, N.J. -- In 2007, I was a first-time home buyer and tree hugger who was looking for a place with a southern exposure -- ideal for the installation of solar panels.

Both of our cars were gas-electric hybrids, but we wanted to do more to clean up the environment.

And thanks to an inheritance, we had a seemingly limitless budget to finally allow us to move out of a cramped duplex apartment. 

So, when I saw an article showing a gee-whiz redesign of a Hackensack ranch home in The Record, where I worked at the time, my wife and I decided to drive over and meet brokers from Buyer's Advisors, who act as agents for buyers only and collect their fee from the seller.

'A mini estate'

The house was being sold by real estate agent Lynn Jantos Donovan, then owner of Property Connections Real Estate in Hackensack, who hired an architect to transform the 3-bedroom ranch in the city's Fairmount section that dated to the 1960s.

Donovan lived there, but also owned several other homes, we were told, one as near as the Jersey shore, others in Mexico and New Mexico, and the last in Hawaii.

Listen to the hype in the original listing of the home:

"This mini estate boasts all the bells and whistles. This Frank Lloyd Wright inspired home has 3 bedrooms..., 3 full bathrooms and over 3,300 sq. ft."

There was a fireplace in the master bedroom, a Jacuzzi tub in the master bath, a gourmet kitchen with a Viking range, and a backyard with a gas fireplace and hot tub.

Once I confirmed the redesigned home had the ideal exposure to the sun to take advantage of a state rebate program for the installation of solar energy, all those features were a seeming bonus, but as a first-time home buyer I missed some major flaws.

As soon as we saw the vaulted ceilings in the airy 1st floor family room, kitchen and dining room, we should have run, knowing the rooms would be impossible to heat with a radiant system under the wooden floor.

We hired an inspector

But even the inspector we hired didn't mention that, so we closed on the house in August 2007, and moved in.

In the following months and years, here are the problems with safety and workmanship that surfaced:

• The Andersen "custom stained glass front doors embedded with [Frank Lloyd] Wright's geometrical color patterns," as reported in The Record, were missing security parts that compromised our safety, and we spent about $1,000 to repair them.
• The first-floor radiant heat was so inadequate we had to set the thermostat to 74 degrees to get even the hint of warmth through the wood floors (used even though stone is the best conductor of radiant heat).
• The roof started leaking in numerous places on both floors, and exterior and interior repairs cost about $7,000.
• Besides causing roof leaks, heavy rains would flood our 2-car detached garage, requiring the installation of a sump pump in a shed behind the garage. When the first couldn't handle the flooding, we upgraded to a bigger one for a total cost of about $1,000.
• The house is so poorly insulated and sound proofed I can hear the boiler in the basement go on when I turn up the thermostat in the second-floor master bathroom.
• One winter, that lack of insulation caused a pipe to burst through a kitchen wall. Repairs cost many hundreds of dollars.

'Cheapest system possible'

Months after we moved in and shivered through our first winter in 2007, I called the plumber who had installed the radiant-heat system under the floor -- plastic tubes carrying hot water from the boiler in the basement -- and was told Donovan asked him to put in the "cheapest system possible."

I eventually got an estimate of $10,000 for installing radiators in the first-floor rooms to solve the problem, but never went ahead with the work.

Roof and skylight leaks

Numerous leaks from the vaulted roof and a skylight in the kitchen, over sliding doors to the deck, in a 1st-floor bedroom and upstairs in the master bedroom and bathroom soon followed -- the apparent result of shoddy workmanship by a ragtag collection of workman Donovan hired for the renovation.

During heavy, wind-whipped rain, we'd have to lay down towels to absorb the leaks or move furniture. Rain even poured into a first-floor bedroom closet through a light fixture.

When we hired a contractor to make repairs, he discovered the original installers of the roof ran out of underlayment -- the layer that protects the plywood deck from moisture -- but instead of getting more used paper and plastic bags that shingles and other roofing material came in.

ROOF BAGS R US: The crew installing a new roof during the 2003 renovation used paper and plastic bags under the shingles, above, when they ran out of the proper leakproof material.

SOLAR POWER: The solar panels we installed in 2009 and 2012 have served us well, above. They generated electricity from sunrise to sunset, thanks to a southern exposure. They were removed to replace our roof and we will be getting a new system that will generate even more electricity.

Small Claims Court

Only the missing security parts in the elaborate double front doors were apparent in the first days of moving in, and I was able to take the seller to Small Claims Court and recover the $1,000 cost of repairs.

When the roof leaks and the myriad other flaws of the elaborate renovation that had apparently been done as cheaply as possible appeared many months or years later, I was never able to locate the seller again to discuss possible reimbursement.