construction defects
THE ESSENTIAL E-NEWSLETTER FOR WATERSHAPE DESIGNERS, ENGINEERS AND BUILDERS September 2, 2020 www.watershapes.com FEATURE ARTICLE…
After years of serving as an expert witness in construction-defect cases, Paolo Benedetti knows what can happen when contractors fail to deliver the expected results. Here, he covers a set of practices aimed at keeping builders on the right path -- and out of the courtroom.
The lessons we've covered in this long sequence of articles have typically revolved around single, key errors and have generally called for commonsense (and often simple) remedies. In the world of pool construction, however, there are situations in which the problems are far more complex, often rising from multiple missteps and clusters of intertwined failures. This is one of those situations, and it has to do with a basic pool/spa combination in a brand-new housing development. Although the pool contractor charged only $35,000 for the installation, the associated legal
In my work as a construction-defect expert witness, I've seen how damaging salty water can be to hardscape materials around pools and spas equipped with saltwater chlorination systems. It's so common that, personally, I now try to avoid using those devices on the watershapes I design and build. It's not that I think saltwater chlorination is intrinsically evil; instead, it's the fact I've seen so many different things go wrong with watershapes that have these systems that I decided some time ago that they weren't for me. It's often said that
Even after all these years, in which countless seminars and classes have covered proper techniques for designing, engineering and building vanishing-edge pools, I am still all-too-frequently confronted in my role as a construction-defects expert witness by installations that are just plain wrong in one way or another. The biggest problems usually have to do with the
Let's stroll back to February 2010: It was about the time we at WaterShapes started getting serious about establishing an Internet presence - and more than a year before we stopped publishing printed editions of the magazine and went all-digital. Back then, we saw the web site as more of a
I was recently involved as an expert witness in a case where, among many other flawed parts of the project, I came across a distinctly substandard pool deck. The grout was cracking all over the place, and most of the flagstone veneer was either loose or in the process of breaking free of the substrate. The diagnosis didn’t take long: All I did was dig back a part of the lawn at the edge of the patio, and the not-so-surprising truth revealed itself.
Interview by Eric Herman Through the past quarter-century, Skip Phillips - owner of Questar Pools in Escondido, Calif., and one of the founders of The Genesis 3 Design Group - has served as an expert witness in more than 300 lawsuits involving pool construction. He estimates that
