Thirty years of hard work has nearly gone down the drain for a southern Alberta family dealing with a homeowner’s nightmare.
Bill and Melanie Brandley say they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to keep their dream home afloat after their builder made extreme structural flaws and later abandoned the project.
“We were warned by people that building a house is difficult,” Bill said. “So we expected problems but we didn’t expect there to be structural problems and the house to be condemned, basically.”
After living modestly in a duplex in Vulcan, Alta., for several decades, the couple decided it was time to upgrade using their savings as a nurse and high school teacher.
Bill had lived in Raymond previously and was looking forward to moving closer to family.
“As the family started getting bigger, it became apparent that it was no longer big enough for all the kids and the grandkids and everything to come, so that’s when we decided to design our dream home,” Bill said.
Largely designed by Bill, the home is situated on a lot on the outskirts of town. The construction company broke ground in 2018, but progress was moving extremely slowly, and the family started encountering trouble.
Inspections found issues in the foundation and structure, making it unsafe to live in. More than $540,000 in repairs were cited as necessary before the home could be fully fixed.
“Every day, we would wake up and there was some new problem we were facing,” Melanie said. “You just get awfully discouraged and beat down.”
“We’ve had to cash in investments. Everything we’ve ever had for retirement has been gone,” Bill said.
The Brandleys say the builder walked away from the project in December 2019, dissolving the company and relocating to the United States.
Although they say they had done research on the builder and not encountered any bad reviews, they later found out others had signed non-disclosure agreements with the company.
“There (were) 13 houses (of the builder’s) that we were told were knock-downs,” Bill explained. “Because the expense to build them was more than the cost of the house.
“That was the first we heard that there had been so many homes that were poorly done.”
Global News reached out to the builder, who said his lawyer advised him not to comment on the situation. Due to a separate non-disclosure agreement, he cannot be named.
New builders are now on site, living in a trailer on the property and working to fix 16 deficiencies in the home, including collapsing walls, electrical issues, missing caulking, a lack of water barriers, and roofing damage.
Alana Kozak, one of Bill and Melanie’s daughters, said she decided to set up a GoFundMe page to ease some of her parents’ stress around the situation.
“We were scared and nervous that they would run out of money and they still would not have their dream home,” Kozak said. “My parents (had done) everything that they could, and it still wasn’t enough.”
By Sunday afternoon, the page had raised upwards of $23,000, surpassing expectations.
“We were expecting maybe $5,000 or $10,000, if that,” Bill said.
“The fact that we can kind of see a light at the end of the tunnel has given us hope.”
“It took off more than we could have hoped for,” Kozak added. “We just want this nightmare to be over.”
Their advice for anyone looking to begin the home-building process: do as much research and background checking as possible.
“We looked at houses they had built, but what we didn’t (do) is we didn’t talk to the homeowners,” Bill said. “I think that was naïve of us. I guess we were trusting and we just believed.”