Homebuyers who expect their newly built castles to be flawless masterpieces are only fooling themselves: The perfect, zero-defect house has yet to be built.

A house is a giant jigsaw puzzle. Not only does it come in as many as 10,000 pieces -- many of which don’t always fit as precisely as they should -- it is put together by dozens of human beings, sometimes working at cross purposes in harsh, if not extreme, weather conditions, almost always under a fast-approaching deadline.

So, yes, builders make mistakes -- sometimes big ones. Like the house Avex Homes built in the Tampa area that was too close to its neighbor. The county rules say no house should be within 10 feet of another, but Avex crews built one with a gap of less than 6 feet. The builder was required to lop 4 feet off the completed house.

This kind of major snafu is a rare occurrence, to be sure. Even structural defects in which one or more load-bearing elements could suffer a catastrophic failure are few and far between.

According to Paul Thomas, national risk manager at 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty, an average of only 1 percent of all new houses suffer a major structural defect over their first 10 years. Of course, that varies; geographic areas with water intrusion issues or expansive soils tend to have more problems.

Minor issues occur more frequently. About 5 percent of all homes, Thomas reports, experience drywall cracks from foundations settling or wood shrinkage.

Face it: Nails pop out from the drywall as a house settles, concrete is going to crack, doors may not close precisely, a floor tile might crack and a bathtub or sink might have a scratch or two. Annoying, yes, but easily repaired without too much hassle.

But every builder has a whopper of a story about a big mistake. A subcontractor misreads a blueprint, a building inspector fails to catch a major flaw, or a product is totally defective and irreparable. Builders won’t talk about these miscues on the record, lest their names become synonymous with shoddy construction, but they’ll share them anonymously.

Here are some of their taller tales:

-- A building inspector in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, discovered that a house’s foundation had been poured 6 inches over the property line, largely because there was 4 feet of snow on the ground. The foundation had to be removed and redone. Fortunately, the mistake was discovered before construction got any further. Had the house been built in its entirety, the builder would have had to seek a variance from the city -- an iffy prospect at best.

-- A Maryland builder once left his blueprints at home, and instead of going back to retrieve them, he guessed on the site lines. He guessed wrong, by 2 feet, and had to start over in the right place.

-- In Columbia, South Carolina, a builder poured the concrete slab over the pipes before he called for a plumbing inspection. He had to break up the slab and start all over again. And he said he has recurring nightmares about building the wrong house on the wrong lot -- a mistake he hasn’t made, at least not yet, but that remains his worst nightmare.

-- That nightmare became a reality for a Seattle builder, who was able to persuade his buyer to switch lots. And a Dayton, Ohio, builder who built four houses on the wrong lots is still mired in a court battle while the four houses sit empty.

-- Then there’s the story of the builder who built the garage ordered by one buyer on the house next door. He solved his dilemma by giving the garage to the neighboring house’s buyer free of charge, and building another one on the right house. “There wasn’t anything else I could do,” he told me.

-- Many builders have horror stories about carpentry nails being driven into plumbing pipes. And once those nails start to work themselves loose, the result is often a slow leak, but sometimes a gusher of a flood.

-- A San Antonio builder recalls the time a carpenter put a window in the wrong place. Just before stopping for lunch, he marked the center of where the window should be. But when returned, he used the mark as a corner, throwing the opening off-center by 18 inches. Only when the house was finished was the error discovered: Four windows lined up perfectly, but the fifth one didn’t.

But not all miscues turn out badly. In Boston, for example, a crew put a gable roof on a house that called for a Tudor style. The buyer was the first to notice the mistake; the builder, who thought it looked awful, was sick about it. He said he would remove the roof and replace it with the proper one.

But the buyer liked it just the way it was. So did some others: Of the next four buyers of the same model house, two ordered their homes with gable roofs as well.

At a recent business dinner in New York City, Rosalie Berg said she was wondering what had become of service in the mortgage sector. Seemed like too many loan officers had forgotten what the word meant.

Berg, who runs Stategic Vantage, a housing finance-centric public relations and advertising firm, had cold-called five lenders when she wanted to refinance her South Florida home. She was shocked at the response -- or worse yet, the lack thereof.

Of the five, three never returned her call, and the other two took more than a day to reply.

“People were not very responsive,” Berg told me. “It really surprised me.”

Our dinner host was Sue Woodard, chief customer officer at Total Expert, a marketing and sales software system for lenders. And she had had a similar experience. When she called to close out her equity line of credit, the lender’s representative didn’t ask why; he just said he’d send over the paperwork without any follow-up at all.

That, says Woodard, who has been in the mortgage business for 30 years, was a “big opportunity missed in a very competitive market.”

Worse, perhaps, she says she has a thousand similar stories. Most recently, her lawn service canceled her contract because it wants to focus solely on commercial work. So she called eight other services that do work in her neighborhood. Not one called back.

“I guess the economy is doing too well,” she commented. “No one seems to want more business.”

Also at dinner was Woodard’s colleague at Total Expert, Brett Cadogan, the firm’s director of strategic alliances. He had his own story about a lack of service. He had listed his house for sale with the wife of the guy who was building his new house. But after five months, he cut her loose, along with her builder-husband, calling the whole thing “a terrible experience.”

When he attempted to start the process all over again a few months later, Cadogan called five agents. Two were “very responsive,” he said. But of the other three, one never returned his call and two didn’t get back to him for a week to 10 days.

Noting that listings are “the lifeblood” of realty agents -- “That’s how they get paid,” he said -- he was really surprised by the response rate. “The level of urgency was pretty much nonexistent.”

The fourth at this dinner was yours truly, and boy, did I have a few stories of my own. Most recently, I have been going round and round with a home warranty company I won’t name directly -- it used to have a fellow named Roebuck in its handle -- but with which I will not do business again. Ever!

When our double oven stopped working, I called this company to repair it, not knowing that it no longer has its own crews, but farms the work out. After several attempts to fix my machine, I still don’t have an oven. But finally, some four months later, the warranty company has agreed to replace it. After all the stalling so far, though, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Then there’s my experience with an insurance company in Florida after Hurricane Irma, as well as my dealings with a big-box retailer that sells all kinds of home-related materials. To this day, the insurance company has yet to return my phone calls, even though I explain in my message that I have letters from two different roofers saying that I have enough damage from the big storm to warrant an entirely new roof.

The company has already closed out my claim, something I didn’t think it would until someone called to say they had received some information from one of the aforementioned roofers. They sent out an engineer weeks ago and I have heard nothing since.

I suppose the next step is to call the insurance commissioner in Florida to complain. I am told that insurers don’t want to be on the bad side of the Florida regulator, so we will see.

The big-box store where I bought new flooring was very slow on the uptake -- that is, once it had my money and the floor was installed. I called several times to complain that the installer had used someone else’s materials, even though they were told not to, and that my contractor was back-charging me.

I wanted the store to cover the charge, which was the installer’s fault, not mine. Once I was actually able to talk with a human being, that person said she would get back to me. Two weeks later, nothing. So I called again and spoke with her associate, who told me he would check it out. Two more weeks, and nothing.

Finally, a month or so later, a representative called to say they would be processing my refund. That’s great, but it shouldn’t have taken so long and so many calls. It has left nothing but a bad taste in my mouth, so much so that I don’t think I will ever buy another thing at this chain, even if I have to drive out of my way to go elsewhere.

Spending your money with a competitor is certainly one way to fight back. But it’s better to keep copious notes about your conversations with customer service people, including their names, identification numbers, the date and the time of day. Never, ever be nasty. Always remain calm. You can express your anger or disappointment without cursing or screaming.

If you get no satisfaction, escalate your beef to a supervisor or manager, either on the phone, in writing or directly at the store or office in question. And if that doesn’t work, take your issue higher and higher up the corporate ladder.

Twice I’ve written a letter to the chairman of Comcast, and both times, the response was swift and favorable.

Everyone knows tenants gripe about their landlords. But landlords have their shares of complaints, too.

According to a recent poll by ManageGo, a property management software company, property owners’ and managers’ biggest bugaboo is tenants who complain about things they should or could do themselves: changing a lightbulb, for example, or repairing a running toilet.

Changing a lightbulb? Come on, people.

And about those cantankerous toilets: How about jiggling the handle a few times to see if that stops the thing from running? Or lift the lid off the tank and adjust the float. If none of that fixes it, then it becomes the landlord’s problem. By all means, give him or her a holler.

But just one call should suffice. Another pet peeve, say the 100 New York City-area landlords surveyed: Multiple repair requests from the same tenant, with repeated emails and/or phone calls about the same problem.

This response indicates landlords think there’s often too much communication, but tenants say there’s not enough to suit them. Half the tenants polled said their landlords fail to keep them up-to-date on progress related to their calls for help.

Obviously, says ManageGo’s Chaim Lowenstein, there’s a need for better communication between landlords and their tenants. And it goes both ways.

Surprisingly, only 10 percent of tenants polled wanted repairs made right away. That’s a good thing, because fixes often become an issue of contractor availability. Some places have a stable of repair techs on duty, but most mom-and-pop landlords don’t have electricians, plumbers and appliance people at their beck and call.

And the more complicated the fix, the longer the wait is likely to be. If an elevator needs replacing in your building, for example, service is going to be down until the old one can be removed and the new one is ordered, installed and tested. So be prepared to take the stairs for as long as that process takes. And if you rent from a part-time landlord, they’ll have to call around until they find someone who won’t break the bank.

“It’s tricky,” says Lowenstein. “Most landlords want to get (a repair) done. But sometimes, they have to revert to their second or third choices. And sometimes they have to make temporary fixes until their first choice can get there.”

Much has been said about how student debt is hurting the ability of many millennials to qualify for a mortgage. But lenders may be starting to take a harder look at the amount of money would-be borrowers are paying every month for their fancy BMWs, Mercedes and Ram trucks.

Why? Because while homeowners overall are getting better at paying their house loans without missing a beat, the overall performance of auto loans has been slowly worsening, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The deteriorating picture is masked somewhat by their strong payback records among borrowers with the highest credit scores. But among those with scores at 620 or below, the delinquency rate, as of last year’s fourth quarter, exceeded 8 percent -- “a development that is surprising,” said economists at the Fed, especially when considering the strength of the economy and labor market.

Although rising delinquency rates remain below the 2010 peak, the economists said, there are still more than 7 million people with auto loans who were 90 days or more late at the end of 2018. That’s a million more than at the end of 2010, when delinquency rates were at their worst.

Their advice to lenders: The situation warrants continued monitoring. Meanwhile, if you are in the market for a house, or just recently bought one, stay away from high-priced vehicles. The payments -- an average of $556 a month for a nearly six-year loan, according to Edmunds.com -- can be killers.

If families were considered mortgage companies, they’d be the seventh-largest lender in the country, according to Legal & General, a multinational financial services firm. The proverbial “Bank of Mom and Dad” is “a hugely influential force in the U.S. housing market,” says L&G’s Nigel Wilson.

Nationally, parents and grandparents supported the purchase of $317 billion worth of property -- some 1.2 million houses -- last year, L&G reports. One in 5 buyers received gifts or interest-free loans from family members so they could buy a house, according to the study. The average amount: $39,000.

Half of all wannabe homeowners under age 35 say they need help from family to make the deal work. And those young buyers who went before them said that without help from the old folks, they would have had to delay their purchases for at least three years.