Fleetwood double wide home - ongoing trouble with holes in walls - told home is out of warranty

# 33 for July 12, 2003

Complaints.com received the following on July 11, 2003:

From:

RE: Fleetwood double wide home - ongoing trouble with holes in walls - told home is out of warranty

My wife and I had a Fleetwood double wide home put on a basement on our property in 1992, after being assured that it was top of the line quality (made with pride in the U S A)

Since that time, on various occasions, I have found places where the cardboard siding ( the stuff under the vinyl siding that is like cardboard celotex) that had holes cut in it, and in some cases the peices were missing. In the places where the peices were not missing, they were just stuffed back into the holes, only to fall out behind the siding.

Today I took the siding off the back of this house in order to build a porch on it, and discovered that at every wall stud there is a hole cut in the cardboard siding, and behind the hole is a notch cut in a stud with a peice of metal nailed over it.

The notches are to accomodate the electrical wiring. In other words, it looks as if they forgot to wire this place, and went back later and wired it by cutting holes from the outside. The notches in the studs (supposedly 2x4s) weaken the boards, and, the wires do not have steel protection gromets, to protect the wires from having nails driven through them.

In one place last year, I took an inside drywall off to replace a door, and discovered a hole about 9x6 inches, that I could see the vinyl siding through. On the same place was a cluster of very haphazardly done wiring in which was a wire that was bent almost double around a wire staple, which is not only against code, it is a dangerous fire hazard.

At one point, a few years back, when I had found some of these holes around a sliding glass door, they sent a "repairman" out to fix them. I discovered today that out of the five I showed him, he only "fixed" two, and then all he did was a bad patch job, when in fact the cardboard siding should have been replaced. In other words, fleetwood sent someone out to shut me up.

All calls are to fleetood are pretty much shrugged off. Today I sent pics to one of their "cusomer service" reps via email and got the again standard reply "your home is out of warrenty".

This is absurd considering that this is not a warrenty issue , it is most likely an illegal building issue. To my knowlege running wiring through notches at the very outside of a wall stud, in a supporting wall, is not code, neither is wiring that does not have protective gromets in the wall studs.

In short, this home is a typical "made with pride in the U S A product" with the typical cusomer support that is nothing more than lip service to shut the customer up until they give up in frustration.

Anyone wanting to see pictures of the pathetic workmanship on this house can email me at Email User

and I will promptly send you pics of it via emal.