We bought a home in Richmond, VA. Generally, the experience was positive. Schell has great floor plans with great curb appeal. Definitely not cookie-cutter. Their sales and decorating teams do a great job. Our construction manager was great to work with. And we were able to customize quite a bit, which is not what you normally see in production builders like Schell. However, the warranty service manager in Richmond was less than helpful. He frequently marked warranty items as “completed” when they weren’t and he explained that they were duplicate when they were not. His logic was that the same contractor would be addressing multiple items so he marked the “duplicate” items as completed when they were not. The problem is their system for reporting and tracking warranty items requires you to categorize warranty items and there is no way to group items by contractor. So, when they would mark items completed when they weren’t, you lost track of what was really done and what was not. They would also take FOREVER to address warranty items and they would show up at random times. So we eventually got frustrated and fixed many of the items ourselves. They ran drain tile from the foundation to the middle of the yard and just stopped it right in the dirt. As a result, we had very marshy conditions and spent well over $10k to mitigate. Lastly, they used engineered wood I-beam joists on our main level and they “over-spanned” them. We have a large open floor plan and several rooms are larger than the 15’ span for which wood I-beams are typically used. As a result, we have considerable bounce in our floors. Dishes rattle and lamps shake when someone walks by. I brought this up to the Richmond division president and she apologized but basically said “that’s our product.” To fix this, we are going to spend more than $23k to add additional steel beams to support the floor. This is not at all what I expected when I paid $755k for my house 4 years ago. To be fair, I had two different structural engineers look at the floor bounce problem and they both said this was a well-constructed house. But they said Schell built to the code requirement, which is the bare minimum. Would I buy from Schell again? Maybe, but I would do things a lot differently and would not have assumed their commitment to happiness meant I was going to get exceptional value in my house.
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Schell Brothers is the premier builder of new homes in Delaware and the Sussex County beach resort area, offering unsurpassed quality and curb appeal.
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