17. December 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

We still have so much more information to post on our websites, we are not even 1/2 way completed.  If you recall; we’ve had water infiltration issues in our brand new 1st owner Heartland Homes built home since 3 months after our new home closing.  We notified Heartland Homes every time we had water infiltrating our newly constructed home.

We are a long way off from a complete picture of our brand new custom home experience in Pittsburgh on our websites. Minimally we thought we would put together a timeline of our new home experience. Please click on the picture directly below to see a high level timeline of our water infiltration issues that started 3 months after closing on our brand new Heartland Homes built home. 

We are told during our 1 year warranty our water issues were being taken of by our custom home builder Heartland Homes in Pittsburgh.

NOTE: when you click on the image above it will open in a new window. You can then click on the photo in the new window to see a larger picture. We wanted to make sure you could read the emails..

Close on brand new first owner Heartland Homes home February 2004.
Water issues start with our home May 2004.

After we file our Heartland Homes Pittsburgh complaint; shortly thereafter the now President of Heartland Homes Pittsburgh Marty Gillespie calls me to discuss our issues and visits our Heartland Homes home in June 2005.

[All of the in-between details are on our websites and will be in our complete Heartland Homes - Pittsburgh YouTube videos. In this current blog, I am simply outlining the “stages” of our Heartland Homes new home experience. Please click to review each response from Heartland Homes in the black/white picture above, you will see ALL of the following documents from Heartland Homes in Pittsburgh to the BBB;]

June 29 2005 - Heartland Homes states “We met with Mr. Romesburg and discussed solutions for his door and wet basement problems. We are currently working with Mr. Romesburg to remedy these issues. Please view image above to read all of the letters from Heartland Homes.

[in between June 2005 - October 2006 - Heartland Homes performs various work on the outside of our home to attempt to correct our water infiltration issues. Our water issues do not get resolved, however we do find water in our electrical panel after the major trenching work was completed. We asked the Better Business Bureau to please escalate our issues at this point.]

Click on image below to read and review Heartland Homes Pittsburgh response stating “…Craig, the production manager, who has been to Mr. Romesburg’s house previously concerning issues..”The electrician found a compromised conduit which housed wiring for the breaker box that was allowing water in. etc”

October 4 2006 (see black and white picture further above to view this letter) - Heartland Homes states “Company states they are currently working with the customer to remedy the problem with the door and wet basement problems. Company is waiting for Duquesne Light…. etc”   “Company seeks to make repairs“

October 17 2006 (see black and white picture further above to view this letter) - Heartland Homes states “Company states they performed work on the customer’s townhouse and this work was done as a courtesy. It is stated in the customer’s warranty that “Damp spots on foundation walls do not constitute a wet basement.” Company further states they are not responsible for damp spots on foundation walls.

October 2006 - we file a Heartland Homes Pittsburgh complaint with the PA State Attorney Generals Office regarding our water infiltration issues.

 November 2006 - Heartland Homes response to our Heartland Homes Pittsburgh complaint is - “Heartland Homes will continue to monitor the situation but believes that the remedial steps taken have eliminated the water staining issue. etc” One photo I would like to point out is this image directly below.

Click on image directly above to see pictures of our home showing water infiltration: December 8 2006, February 9 2007, May 2 2007, July 11 2007 and July 17 2007. Heartland Homes response to the State Attorney Generals office is dated November 2006.

NOTE: because there is so much detail in the response to the State Attorney Generals Office, the files are too large to post here.. Please go to our following website and look under the “Pennsylvania State Attorney General Office” section.  Review our Heartland Homes complaint details at http://aheartland.daverome.com/

[NOTE: State Attorney General complaint goes from October 2006 - October/November 2007]

December 2007 - we file our Heartland Homes Pittsburgh complaint and start our legal proceedings.
See our websites from details because there is so much to post with over 5 years of history. 3 months after closing, in May 2004 we started experiencing water infiltration issues in our brand new 1st owner Heartland Homes Pittsburgh built home.

We closed on our brand new Heartland Homes built home February 2004, below are two photos from July 8 2008. Not the most recent photos, because after 1,000+ photos, countless hours and the thousands of dollars it cost us legally, we haven’t had much time or energies to focus on newly updated photos. Please keep in mind, our websites do outline this information; Heartland Homes did perform trenching work in 2006, the photos below are from 2008..

December 2007 - March/April 2009 - we start our lawsuit against Heartland Homes in Pittsburgh, our custom home builders. Minimally the 3 pictures below will show you the Judge found in our favor. Heartland Homes appealed the monies portion of our verdict. The Judge awarded us a new trial for damages, however I am not sure of the verbiage to use; we were awarded a new trial, HOWEVER we could not submit expanded details or any new or updated photos, structural engineer details or anything else.
  
We had no idea how granular our details needed to be from the Structural Engineer we hired. So the details in the Structural Engineer report was exactly as I told our engineer; just high-level information pertaining to the water issues we have. Needless to say that did not buy us much in court. Even all of the contractors we had come out to bid on the work, their bids were all over $20,000.00 for repairs. Before I found out we could NOT submit any additional evidence or details; I personally chiseled brick from the front of our home and pulled vinyl siding back from the side of our Heartland Homes home we’ve had water issues with for so long.

Please go to our websites to view additional details including court documents, photos, our legal fees, etc.  aheartland.daverome.com  /  heartlandhomes.aloveheartland.com  / aloveheartland.com

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19. November 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Folks,  I am trying to use our blog to emphasize specific areas where we receive questions or just various high lights of our issues with our Heartland Homes home. Closed on our brand new Heartland Homes home February 2004, water issues started May 2004, viewing our sites you know the history of the emails from Heartland Homes stating they were working on our issues, etc…  We are still working on our websites and we have a lot more pictures to post. In the meantime, we hit another milestone with another photo, this is also the water in our electrical panel as well. So that picture is posted here as well.  982 views as of this morning of this photo showing our electrical conduit.

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19. November 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Folks we wanted to say THANK YOU once again for another milestone. Since July 2009 we’ve had our Google Picasa Gallery up with some of the photos of our Heartland Homes in Pittsburgh, new home experience. I believe yesterday some time, we hit one picture with over 1,013 views.  

You can also view our entire Heartland Homes home builder experience gallery at
http://picasaweb.google.com/dromesburg

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21. October 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

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7. October 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Excerpt from the certified letter we sent, signature and photos to Heartland Homes founder, owners; Alan Gillespie or Marty Gillespie. We updated this image to include a summary from this time frame. This was after our 1 year warranty was over and we continued to have water infiltration issues. As we’ve repeated many times before, Heartland Homes did tell us they would continue to work towards a solution.

I am paraphrasing this comment that was made during our trial - it was pointed out to me, Dave Romesburg, while I was on the stand that nowhere in Heartland Homes warranty or service procedures manual does it state when repairs would be completed by. However please note this letter was signed for and after almost three weeks of waiting for a response, we never heard anything back from Heartland Homes. We did state in our letter we would file a complaint against Heartland Homes if we did not hear back from Heartland Homes by June 13 2005.

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27. September 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Review the photo of our brand new Heartland Homes Pittsburgh home 6 months old. We closed on our brand new 1st owner Heartland Homes Pittsburgh home February 2004.
 
Review of our Heartland Homes Pittsburgh home this photo is from August 2004 - 6 months old.

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17. September 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Our Heartland Homes Pittsburgh home built in 2004, about 3 1/2 yrs old.
Water infiltration started 3 months after closing on our brand new
Heartland Homes Pittsburgh home.
We still haven’t done anything with our basement as of yet, this is 2009.
You can’t finish your basement when you have water infiltrating your foundation.
ps - I realize as well I spelled February incorrectly once I saved this photo, sorry!

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15. September 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

3 months after closing our brand new Heartland Homes home.

Folks,
 We wanted to personally thank everyone for your support.
By visiting our websites, sending us emails showing support, each and every one of you are really helping us to confirm what we already feel! So thank you for that!!

Great news that our Heartland Homes site daverome.com has hit over
3,000 visitors since we launched our site in February 2009.
We still have a lot of updates to do and a lot of photos to post.
So whether you have visited our site once or multiple times,
THANK YOU once again for your support.

Sincerely
Dave & Chris

5 months after closing our brand new Heartland Homes home.

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10. September 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

We created an additional Heartland Homes gallery of our Heartland Homes experience. The slide show contains all of our newest chronologically posted history with our brand new Heartland Homes home purchase and our water infiltration issues & history. You can click on the slide show to go directly to a new browser window where you can view the photos individually and at your leisure. Folks thanks again for all of the emails and the various questions we’ve been asked. We are working diligently on incorporating everything into our websites so can see our Heartland Homes history, without question.

our Heartland Homes gallery new home experience timeline

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3. September 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

We closed on our brand new Heartland Homes home on February 2004. May 2004 is when we started seeing water infiltrating our brand new 1st owner home.

You can read every email we sent to Heartland along with the digital photos we sent showing our water infiltration issues that started 3 months after our new home closing.  Specifically during our 1st year timeframe, Heartland Homes told us they were working on our water infiltration issues. Minimally we sent over 12+  emails regarding water infiltration issues to Heartland Homes. Every time water infiltrated our brand new home, we notified Heartland Homes.

 Click the underlined link above to see every email and read every email in PDF format.

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31. August 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Folks, Thanks again for all of the emails and questions.

I see a lot of folks are looking at the latest updates to our websites. I also noticed a huge jump the past few two weeks specifically in the count of visitors to our Google Picasa Web Gallery.  Some of the photos are up to over 500+ visits, so thank you once again! Just for the curious, we can not edit or add/change the # of visit to each photo, so those are legitimate individual visits.

I spoke with our contractor yesterday that will be handling the repairs to correct the water infiltration issues into our Heartland Homes home. He is planning on starting the work here some time. I told him since we’ve had 5 years of water infiltrating our home, it doesn’t have to happen yesterday. Since WE are footing the bill for all of our repairs and in the past 1 - 1+ years we spent over $26,000.00 between legal fees, replacing our electrical panel, deposition fees, etc, we need to save a little more cash up.

I am going to post the proposal that goes along with the expanded details we could NOT submit to court because all of our supporting documentation was already submitted. Stay tuned I will post that information in the next day or so..

PLEASE REMEMBER - our trial is OVER… Since the proof we submitted to court was NOT granular enough, most of what was on the contractors proposal was thrown out because I only asked for a high level Structural Inspection report. I didn’t know every minute granular detail needed to be in the Structural Engineers report. We weren’t told that until after our trial started.  More details posting soon… Thanks again!

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27. August 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Below you will see an idea of what it cost us trying to pursue getting our water issues resolved by our builder Heartland Homes in Pittsburgh.

There is a long 5+ year history here. Imagine buying a brand new 1st owner home, 3 months later water infiltrating our block foundation into our basement and continuing. This should give you a good idea of our costs we paid in addition to buying our brand new home.

IMPORTANT to NOTE: During our 1st year we were told by Heartland Homes they were working on our water infiltration issues. I will post those emails here shortly. In the meantime if you click on the link below for our aloveheartland.com website, you can read the emails there as well.

Click on the image bring up a larger sized view of this image I constructed. You will see that between legal expenses, depositions fees, photos, our Better Business Bureau case and replacing our electrical panel, as well as expert witness testimony, we’ve spent over $26,000.00 of our monies trying to get our water issues corrected.

This does NOT include the monies it will cost to actually get our once brand new home repair. I will post the photos showing where we removed brick from our home and pulled back our vinyl siding and verified in those areas we have no flashing installed. I will get into more details later about that.
 
tons of updates as well to aloveheartland.com

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6. August 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Here are some detailed photos from the start of our Heartland Homes custom home experience. The photos below are just a snapshot of our 3 month - 17 month time frame in our brand new Heartland Homes home.
You can ideally see what our 1st year looked like in our brand new home. Even though Heartland Homes told us on 3 different occasions they were working on our issues during our 1 year time frame, we never noticed any difference with (less) water infiltrating our home. To note as well; never once did anyone from Heartland Homes asked to come into our home during our 1 year warranty to look at our water infiltration issues. Additional note: we were never asked if our water infiltration issues were resolved. No one ever contacted us from Heartland Homes to state they completed working on our water infiltration issues….

  Here is a small list of the 17+ emails we sent to Heartland Homes our new home builder regarding our water infiltration issues. The complete full list of emails all in PDF format are located at CLICK HERE.
Click on that link to open a new window that will take you to our webpage where you can view all 50+ emails, etc.

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4. August 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Folks

 Thank you once again for the continued support. We’ve added a lot of updates to our Picasa Photo Gallery including some text slides to give you a more precise picture of our history. I also changed how some of our photos are organized and added quite a few more photos. I will add more text slides this week.  We converted the certified letter we sent to the owner(s) of Heartland Homes, Alan or Marty Gillespie to an image format, so you can read the actual letter we sent to them.  We’ve posted some images of what was discovered behind our brick veneer as well as our vinyl siding, our Structural Engineer granular report on actually we needs to happen to correct our water infiltration issues. Our Structural Engineer did come back out to our home, after we removed 5 sections of brick from the front of home and pulled back siding. So the granular inspection report John put together was taking into consideration we found no flashing in the sections where brick was removed. No flashing was installed around our dining room, where our vinyl siding was pulled back. Additionally the 2003 International Building Code does state about weepholes being installed. John was also aware, we found no weepholes installed in our brick veneer at all. Please review the new details we’ve added and will continue to update.

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28. July 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Not entirely sure at first who owned Heartland Homes when we bought our home. After our 1 year warranty was over and our water infiltration issues still existed, we sent a 4 page certified letter to Heartland Homes. We made the certified letter to the attention of Alan or Marty Gillespie. We find out that Alan Gillespie is the owner of Heartland Homes. At the time when Marty Gillespie visits our home after we file our BBB case, Marty is the VP or I believe the Vice President of Heartland Homes. At our trial in December 2008, we find out at that time Marty Gillespie is the President of Heartland Homes.

Instead of posting all 4 pages of the certified letter we sent, we decided to post only the signature page. Our intention is to show we made numerous, numerous  efforts to get our water infiltration issues resolved with our brand new Heartland Homes built home.     

After almost 3 weeks we never heard back from Heartland Homes. Our next step was to file a complaint with the Pittsburgh Better Business Bureau. Additional details will be posted shortly.

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27. July 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

We wanted to say thank you to everyone in West Virginia that we spent time with this weekend. We know a lot of you come from various parts of West Virginia and it was great seeing you again and meeting you while we were attending the Contemporary American Theater Festival.

 CATF   Dear Sara Jane was the most incredible play and Joey Parsons was truly the most incredible one-person performance we have ever seen!!! Joey thank you so much! You were stellar in Fifty Words as well.

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25. July 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Folks,

Hi and sorry for the delay..I’ve added some additional photos to the main page of our site: aloveheartland.com.

We literally have close to 1,000 photos, 5 yr history that goes along with the 1,000+ hours we’ve spent trying to get our issues resolved and the thousands and thousands of dollars in legal fees, BBB costs, etc. Which we will also post. During our 1 year warranty period, we sent Heartland Homes 17 or 18 emails. They require an email for any warranty work, per their instructions. During the 17 or 18 emails we sent, 3/4 of the emails had photos, if not more than 3/4 of the emails we sent. I know I keep posting this everywhere. I want to make sure no one doubts us.

We were told By HEARTLAND HOMES, they were working on our issues, yet after our 1 year is up, they are no longer around and we are never told anything.Read all of the emails here.

We wanted to make sure we did not push our water issues because we wanted to make sure our water issues were addressed. We didn’t log the calls, however we also made a few phone calls as well to follow up. All told I guess it really didn’t matter our approach, since our water infiltration issues were never resolved during our 1 year warranty or thereafter. We were never asked by Heartland Homes, at any time, if our water infiltration issues were resolved. Yet we were told they were working on our issues and after 1 year warranty was up, not a word from the builder even after we sent the certified letter to Alan Gillespie and/or Marty Gillespie of Heartland Homes.

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21. July 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Google is a great tool to have available to anyone using the internet, web. I installed Google Analytics a little while back because I wanted to find out how people were finding out websites. Its amazing how many daily hits we get on both of our sites. The results are not edited, however I did remove the %’s and the actual numbers. All I can say is its very black and white folks are looking at all of our details on our websites.

Our Google Analytics search results shows what words, phrases, etc people search to find our site with.

We also added our Picasa Web Gallery that was actually online about 1 year ago.  our Heartland Homes experience Picasa Web Gallery - not all of our photos and this gallery is about 1/2 complete. Our actual Web Gallery - complete Web Gallery with all details in photo form, is in the works as I posted previously.

Folks - THANK YOU for your continued support!

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20. July 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

heartlandhomes.aloveheartland.com our Heartland Homes custom built home Web Gallery is currently available.

We still have quite a bit of work to do and should have quite a bit posted later this week. Please stay tuned and welcome to Our Custom Built Heartland Homes new home experience.

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16. July 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Folks here is a web gallery (further below, over 230+ photos/ since the start of our water infiltration issues) we created quite some time ago. There are no recent photos in this gallery, however when we officially post the Web Gallery on our website, that gallery will include everything.. This gallery is basically everything up to during our Better Business Bureau case we filed and before we started our court trial.Just this gallery itself, truly paints a crystal clear picture of our Heartland Homes brand new home experience. You just can’t put into words the feeling of the past 5+ years. The thousands of hours we’ve had to put into everything, not to mention the thousands and thousands of dollars just trying to get the builder to resolve our water issues like they stated they would:July 22 2004 - “basement remedy to being in the next few weeks…” Sept 21 2004 - “Castleview is still a work in progress…” January 21 2005 (8 months after our water issues started) - “We will continue to work towards a solution, weather is a factor now…”   and nothing.. No issues resolved, however thousands of hours spent trying and over $25,000.00+ in legal fees, BBB costs for our hearing, replacing our electrical panel, etc.This does not include what it will actually cost us to repair our home.. You can watch this Picasa based Web Gallery from this blog OR if you click on the slideshow, you will be launched directly to our gallery. From there, click “VIEW ALL” to see all 230+ photos you can select whatever photos you want to look at individually

From Heartland Homes built custom home. Here is our Heartland Homes new home experience. Click on photo above to view larger image. Click on link above to go to our entire Heartland Homes gallery of our experience to see all of our photos.

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16. July 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

Morning Folks,

 Thank you once again for all of the supportive emails! Really means a lot to us.. As I’ve emailed back to a few of you, the following pages are currently being updated. There are a lot of updates and a lot more information to post.

I want to start to focus on the flashing and weep holes we discovered we couldn’t find on our home. There has to be a simple reason why water started infiltrating our home 3 months after our new home closing and continued. Builder told us they were working on our water infiltration issues, then after our 1 year warranty, we hear nothing further from the builder, until we file our BBB case.

We posted the 2003 International Building Code (IBC) about window flashing and weep holes (which we do not have weep holes installed anywhere, we removed brick from the front of our home and pulled siding from the side of our home) there is no window flashing in the areas where we removed brick or pulled siding installed). 

Andersen Windows documentation we received with our windows (posted on our sites) specifically states “UNIT must be properly flashed” (our photos where we removed brick and didn’t see flashing or pulled the siding) and our “Registered Professional Engineer” engineers report minimally stating “no weepholes or flashing were observed above the foundation.” Our Structural Engineers report was done before we removed brick from the front of our home and pulled back the siding around our dining room window. All of our windows are Andersen Windows.. If the window manufacturer states “UNIT must be properly flashed”, IBC 2003 states windows and doors are to be flashed, weep holes installed and our Structural Engineer reports flashing and weepholes…. Flashing and weepholes are installed for a reason.

important note: because of an email a supportive consumer sent to us; we want to honestly, specifically and clearly state: at NO time did Heartland Homes ever send a Structural Inspector to our home to look at our issues or make recommendations about resolving our issues. NOR did Heartland Homes ever asked to come inside of our home during our 1 year warranty to look at our water infiltration issues.

our detailed Heartland Homes experience

costs we’ve had to pay for legal fees, structural inspector, etc because of our water issues. Builder not resolving our water infiltration issues since three months after our new home closing. Even thought they stated they will “continue to work towards a solution…”

Structural Inspector report(s), building codes, details.

New home construction details about flashing and weep holes - specifically building code & our home

Court trial details: for now, posted the Judges verdict in our favor, Heartland Homes appeal for the monies portion, but not the verdict, our discontinuance we filed.

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23. June 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

We closed on our brand new Heartland Homes home February 2004.May 2004 we start experiencing water infiltration into our basement. We constantly notified Heartland Homes, our new home builder. You can read all of the emails WITH photos we sent to Heartland Homes Warranty Department. As you will see a lot of our emails were never responded to, however the 3 responses we did receive indicating they were working on our water infiltration issues during our 1 year warranty. No one ever came inside of our home to look at anything, nor did anyone stop and ask us questions about our water issues from Heartland Homes…

After literally thousands of hours, thousands and thousands of dollars, hundreds or thousand + of digital photos, its just been one thing after the other. We have 2 dedicated websites to our Heartland Homes new home experience that started in 2004. The main reason for all of this energy IS because we thought our brand new home experience would have been truly memorable IN so many ways. We still can’t imagine spending almost $200,000.00 on a brand new Heartland Homes home and going through what we did and still continue to experience. I mean buying a brand new home is the MOST EXPENSIVE purchase most people will make in their lives. We are still not sure why or what we ever did to experience what we have experience.  For the first 4+ of our new home experience, we kept everything to ourselves while working with the Better Business Bureau, then to court. We’ve decided to share our new home experience because we feel the more information folks have, the better decisions everyone can make.

Our websites are still in the works because 5+ years is a lot of history to organize, but you can truly get a great snapshot, without anything hidden by going to our websites:  http://aloveheartland.com      or    http://daverome.com   - both sites have slightly different formats and somewhat different content, so we do not overlap information continually.  Heartland Homes was notified continually and throughout the entire time we were having issues, until we no longer heard back from them.If you go to http://daverome.com/heartland_homes_contact.htm- you can READ and fully review the 55+ emails we sent to them. Nothing threatening and almost all of our emails contained photos; in our opinion, they were very well informed of the issues we were having…

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22. June 2009 by Dave Romesburg.

to be able to post any comments to our blog… I will update our blog continually with what we recently updated on our website(s)aloveheartland.com   and/or   daverome.com5+ years of history is a lot to cover and we want to make sure we don’t miss any details.

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