Reply #84: I can tell pretty easily [View All]

First, McMansions are ALWAYS in developments. You'll never see one standing alone--if it's off by itself, it's just a big house.

Second, check the distance between houses. If the local fire code says the house must be no less than 10 feet from the one next to it, there's 10 feet one inch between houses.

Third, look at the windows. Vinyl windows with clear insulated glass in them do NOT belong in a $600,000 house.

Next, look at the roof. One of the local McMansion developers is building $500,000 houses with 20-year three-tab shingles on them. And I know they're 20-year three-tab shingles because he's getting them from me and I gotta special order them. The only way to pay less for shingles is to steal them from a jobsite.

If the $500,000 house has MDF moulding instead of actual wood, that's kind of a giveaway too. (MDF is made by mixing sawdust with glue, putting it into a hydraulic press and squishing the shit out of it. A pile of sawdust a foot deep becomes a quarter-inch of MDF.) We have LOTS of customers who come in because little Sally was rollerskating in the kitchen, ran into the wall and destroyed the chair rail. Guys, I didn't even know they MADE chair rail out of MDF until Numb Nuts Construction, Inc., started using it. I knew about baseboard and crown, but chair rail? Chair rail is intended to take abuse; why the hell do you want to hang sawdust there?

My personal pet peeve is expensive houses with Masonite siding on them. (Masonite siding is made by squishing the shit out of really heavily sap-infested wood.) My wife is in love with a neighborhood called Buckhead. It's one of the biggest McMansion tracts in the city, if not THE biggest. They don't let you in unless you can get $500,000 together, and every fucking one of those shitbox houses has this crap on it. They put this development in no more than 10 years ago, and already the cheap-ass siding they used is starting to rot.

Next stop: the insulation. Code in the state of North Carolina is R-30 ceiling, R-13 walls and R-19 floors. Until someone down here figured out that insulation helps with air conditioning bills, it was R-19/R-11/R-19. Hippie Jim the Insulation King sez R-49 ceiling/R-19 walls/R-30 floors is the bare minimum, and he'd be more than happy to sell you R-65 or more for your attic. Anyway...if you go up in the attic and there's 9.5 inches of insulation in there, you're dealing with a McMansion.

Interior amenities: Should a half-million buy you a laminate countertop and a vinyl floor in your kitchen? No, but I've seen it. I've also seen coil-top ranges, thermofoil cabinets, refrigerators with no icemakers (for five hundred grand I want to see either Jenn-Air, KitchenAid or LG appliances with stone countertops, or Miele or Bosch appliances with Corian countertops) and dishwashers with mechanical timers.

I would love to do a development. I'd put 50 houses on 50 acres. Say...oh, 3000sf, top of the line everything, lots of trees. Site it so that you had a 20-acre rock bed to store solar heat collected off everyone's roofs, and use that as primary heating.