hausdok

That's easy, you just respond with, "Well, if you think it will scare them off than it's best they know anyway; otherwise, when they find out you and I both are liable to end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. I'll tell you what, I'll let you tell them before we start. That way, if they are spooked by it, we won't have to waste our time inspecting this home." ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, So it looks like your plan is to widen the long axis of the house and bring it even with the back of the newer portion. Correct? If there aren't any footings under the foundation remaining from the older part of the house you can add them now or you can have pin-pilings added to support those older walls. Have you talked to the municipal inspector to see what he'll accept? Have you spoken to an engineer? The cost for having pin piles installed is all over the map and depends on what the market will bear in your area. A good engineer that deals with residential construction issues like this in your area will have a good idea of what it will cost to have that done. You can always add footings the old fashioned way; bust out the floor of that old basement, excavate beneath the wall and add them in 4 foot sections. Dig out a six foot trench under the wall, lay in rebar, pour your concrete in the middle four feet leaving the rebar extended from the pour a foot on each end, skip six feet of wall and do it again, and again, and again until you've gone all the way around. Once you've gone all the way around, give it a month to cure and then start over, excavating the remaining areas and tying the new rebar into that placed in the previous pours. Very labor intensive, very dirty, very time consuming but might be cheaper than what it will cost to have the entire thing pin-piled. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Send him an a letter informing him that you'll be invoicing him per the previous conversation. If he refuses to pay, take him to small claims court and put your case before a judge. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

OK Folks, It's time to start whining to the spouse about what you want for Christmas and here it is. Douglas Hansen, Jim Katen and Redwood Kardon have revised and updated Electrical Inspections of Existing Dwellings. Pre-sale orders will get 10% off the electronic edition and free shipping on the print edition. Get your pre-sale order in now for delivery In January of 2013. Well, what are you waiting for? Click the friggin link NOW! http://www.codecheck.com/cc/EIED.html ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yeah, I had one of those on a house down in the central district. Except that bullet had impacted the roof from the sky and a little bit of the butt end of the slug was sticking out of a shingle. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

It will continue to stay red for a few minutes and it will gradually fade away. Sometimes it takes as long as five or ten minutes. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I don't know about Oswego, but well over 90% of my clientele these days are from overseas. Most are Chinese or Indian but some other are from places such as Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Vietnam, Turkey, Laos or Cambodia. I've even had a couple from Iran and another couple from Syria. For me, it's be a better than even chance that if I was booked to do a home like that the client would probably be from overseas. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Well, I'm a retired cop; so I suppose I could be considered an expert of sorts on this subject. Seeing a weapon lying around isn't probable cause to believe that a crime has taken place - it doesn't even rise to the level of reasonable suspicion. Something like 35 million citizens in this country own weapons. The mere presence of a weapon isn't a crime and most cops aren't going to be interested in it unless you can give them enough to establish probable cause. Here's how probable cause works. If you see a crime take place and report it to the police, or they see it take place, they have probable cause to act. If you don't have knowledge of an actual crime and you report something you consider to be suspicious to the the police they might follow up to try and confirm your suspicions but they are not allowed to enter onto someone's private property without something more compelling than you just seeing an unattended weapon. They can't touch that weapon unless the legal owner of the property allows them access to the property; and they can't touch that weapon, or confiscate it, unless they are protecting someone from imminent danger or they are preventing distruction of evidence of a crime that they have reasonable suspicion to believe has occurred. If I inspect a home and see a bunch of holes that I believe to be bullet holes in a wall, see a bunch of liquid on the floor that I'm convinced is blood, and I see a weapon lying there, I can report that to the police. With those circumstances the police would rightfully have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has probably taken place, and would have cause to ask the owner of the property for access so that they could investigate further, in the hope of confirming that a crime has taken place. However, if the owner refused them access they'd have to take that information to a judge and hope that the judge felt that the preponderance of evidence supports issuance of a warrant. In the meantime, if they were convinced a crime has taken place, and there is reason to suspect that the homeowner would destroy that evidence, they'd have to find a way to prevent the homeowner from destroying the evidence. That's more tricky. It's usually accomplished by taking the homeowner into protective custody and questioning him long enough for someone to get the warrant. All of this is far from the OP so we should stop discussiong this aspect of it now and just stick to the original question, which is, if you knew a violent crime had taken place in the home and saw that nobody had told your client about it would you tell the client about it or not? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Here's a question for some of you green energy folks who're familiar with solar power - How/when does the system backfeed the grid? We know that running a generator when it's still hooked up to the grid can be bad but what about a bunch of solar panels on the roof - if the power goes out and the solar panels are engaged to power the house, and there's no way to isolate the system from the grid, will they endanger a lineman working on a pole somewhere the same way kicking on a generator connected to a panel that's not isolated from the grid could kill that lineman? How about under normal circumstances when the system is powering your house and there's nothing wrong with the grid? We've all heard about how when folks have those systems their meters sometimes run backwards? How exactly does that work? Is there some kind of sensing device that knows when power from the solar system is not sufficient and which then allows power from the grid to feed the system? How exactly does that work? Chad, I know that you used to inspect those systems for a firm that manufactures them. Can you elaborate? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

No. Because there isn't a chance in hell they didn't already know about something that big.Somebody always knows someone who knows something. Really, Well Gary, let's imagine the clients were a Korean couple where the husband works for LG and was being transferred to the your area and they hadn't been following the local news? How would you expect them to know about what had happened there. Do you think they'd be interested? Being married to a Korean, I can attest that they not only would want to know but once they knew about it they'd be out that door quicker than you could turn to look at their agent. Despite being an ultra-modern country, there are some things Koreans are skittish about and one of them is ghosts. Someone dying in bed of natural causes, no problem . Someone dying a violent death? They will give the place wide berth. Ultimately, Bill's question is a loaded one; like a trick question on a quiz because there is no "right" answer. We are all our own masters and we'll each do/say what each of us feels is correct for our own situation based on our own knowledge and experience. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Well, Bob is wrong on one count - the abandoned weapon. The police would not have jurisdiction unless Bob knew that the weapon was used in a crime. A gun left in an attic is just a piece of property left behind by the seller and it still belongs to the seller until the property changes hands. It doesn't have the potential to kill everyone within 100 ft. like a piece of unexploded ordnance or an old box of sweating dynamite, or the ability to poison everyone within five hundred meters like certain unstable chemicals, so the police would probably say, "Thanks for your info, Bob, but we really can't do anything about that. You need to contact the seller and let him know he left a potentially dangerous piece of his property lying around and ask him to come back and get it." The police do not have a right to the gun just because it's there; they do not even have a right to go onto the property without a warrant unless they have exigent circumstances - evidence the weapon was used in a crime and know for a fact that if they don't act immediately the weapon will disappear, or it's something that has the potential to endanger everyone around such as explosives or unstable chemicals. The police don't just take peoples' abandoned property; it's more difficult than that. If they take it, there is a long and involved voucher process that has to take place in order to put that piece of property into the evidence room or impound/property room. Until you've experienced the amount of paperwork that cops have to process on a daily basis, you can't appreciate the aversion most cops have to doing it. Most cops I know would have told John to advise the parent of the kids to secure the weapon so that the kids couldn't get it. Then, if the homeowner had only been there less than 90 days, would have told John to advise the new homeowner to contact the former owner to come pick up his/her property and to keep the kids out of the attic until the weapon had been picked up. Unless the seller was unknown and unreachable they wouldn't voucher that weapon into inventory. As for the question in the OP? If I knew a murder or some other horrible crime had taken place on the property I guess I'd want to know if my client had been told about it by the seller or the agent. Sure, it's not a condition of the property; but it could impact my clients welfare at some future time by making that home more difficult to sell - the same way undisclosed defects I discover could have impacted my client and made the home harder to sell in the future if I hadn't discovered them. It's not always what you can see; sometimes it's about whether the client is being treated fairly. Some folks would never want to live in a home where a murder has occurred - some it wouldn't bother. Even if my client were of the latter bent - if a murder had occurred there and the murder were concealed from my client, the client is being deprived of the right to decide whether he/she wants to own a home with a possible stigma attached to it that could affect its saleability in the future. So, if I knew about it, I wouldn't put it in the report but I'd find out whether the client had heard about it, and I'd do it in a conversational way. It'd go something like, "Well XXXXX, I was excited to book an appointment to inspect this home. It's been more than seventeen years since I've inspected an actual crime scene; let alone one where a murder has taken place." I'm pretty sure that the client would either say something like, "Yeah, pretty cool, huh?" or "What? What crime scene? What murder? What the hell are you talking about?" at which point I'd either chuckle knowingly or feign embarrassment at having spilled the beans, tell him maybe he should be discussing that with his agent, and inwardly chuckle at the ass reaming that I know the agent is about to endure for having not been completely upfront about the home with the client. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

What am I missing? The cheapest LG I saw on that page was a refurbished 17 footer for $269.99. OT - OF!!! M.

In 2008 a law was passed in Great Britain requiring sellers of homes to provide a Home Information Pack (HIP) for buyers to review. The law spawned thousands of new "Home Inspectors" that were stongly opposed by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). Then the bottom fell out of the economy and many of those new inspectors ended up bankrupt or worse. Anyway, I thought you guys might like to see what a home inspection report looks like in Britain. Click on this link. It will take you to a real estate listing in Great Britain. Once there, scroll down to "Property Info" and click on the blue link entitled HIP. That will open up the inspection report for this home. Enjoy. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yeah, I know, so didn't the Corvair heaters. My family had a slough of those cars. They were the closest thing to having a snowplow one could have without having a snowplow. When everyone else was stuck, my family and uncles and cousins were all driving around thumbing our noses at the front-engined guys stuck in the ditch. Anyway, my bad, like I said, I'd forgotten about those or I would never have said every auto on the planet was heated that way. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Les, Yeah, you're right; I'd forgotten about the VW and Corvair heaters. OT - OF!!! Mike

Yet it is how every automobile on the planet is heated. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Ducane uses two types of serial numbers. Either of the following examples: 1234569827 or 4606A12345. The first has the year followed by the week in the last four digits of the serial number and the second has the week followed by the year in the first four digits of the serial number. Not sure how that can help you with the serial number destroyed. I've blown up that second photo. I think the last four might be 0113 which would make it April of 2001 when it was manufactured. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Nah, When I first got on the net in 1996 MSN was my ISP and I had an msn email account. They eventually merged that with hot mail and now it's called msn live or something like that and costs me about $20 a year. Steel-toed boots; I'd want to wear steel-toed boots to do my punting. OT - OF!!! M.

Yeah, I'm getting old. I've got more of a live and let live attitude these days, as you can see. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I'm pissed. I just spent an hour wading through internet site after site after site to find a phone number for customer service because I'd gotten an email telling me that my Hotmail subscription was about to expire and I had to renew or risk interruption of service. Now, you might ask, "So what, we all get those, what's the problem?" Well, the problem is that the prevalence of hackers and phishing scammers on the net has become so commonplace that one can't trust emails anymore from what used to be trusted sources. This particular email had a return address of Phoenix but when you live less than four miles as the crow flies from the Microsoft campus you tend to be skeptical of stuff coming from alleged affiliates a thousand miles away. So, I finally got through to a warm body on the other end of the line. The nice lady - Hazel - informed me that the email was in fact the real deal. She explained that they'd been trying to automatically renew my account but that it kept getting rejected. Well, it has been so long since I opened that subscription that I have no idea what credit card account I'd used to open it. I suspected that card was one of the accounts I told my wife to close down a while back because we weren't using it. In order to help me, Hazel wanted me to give her the last four numbers on the account I'd used in 1996 to open that email account. I couldn't do that 'cuz I had no idea which account it had been. Finally I asked her, "Can't we verify this some other way? Isn't there a secret question I can answer. Couldn't you ask me what my password to the account is?" She pointed out that if my account were hacked anyone could give her the password. She was able to access my account though and there was a question there which I was able to answer. Apparently, anyone hacking my account can't get to the area where the answers to the secret questions are maintained (let's hope so). Long story short (Yeah, riggggghhhht, O'Handley), she was finally satisfied that I was who I said I was and she was able to change the billing information on the account so that it could be automatically updated from now on; and she gave me a telephone number to use in the event I ever had other hotmail billing questions where I wanted to again talk to a warm body. "Can I do anything else for you, Mr. O'Handley," she asked. "Yeah," I said, "You can tell me when microsoft, lord of the computer universe, is going to find a way to send me an email that I can trust without question, is coming from microsoft, and isn't some cleverly ginned-up phishing scam created by a hacker." Her response, "But Mr. O'Handley, the email we sent you was legitimate and wasn't a phishing scam. Why would you have thought that it wasn't?" For a moment I stood there looking at the receiver like it had just licked my ear; then I sighed, thanked her and hung up. Crimeny, if the folks working for the computer lords don't understand how serious the phishing and scamming is out here, how can we ever expect them to get a handle on this ever-widening pool of internet thieves? It's fixed....for now; but I know that somewhere down the road I'm going to have to do this all over again for something else and that's when an hour or two of my life will disappear down the rabbit hole of website directives, automated answering devices that give you a myriad of irrelevant choices and folks that pass you from person to person until you finally land on the right desk. The internet was supposed to make our lives easier but in some ways it's made life harder and more stressful. Just once before I die I'd like to find a hacker/phisher and have the opportunity to give him a good swift kick in the groin for putting us through this. In fact, that should be the punishment the courts mete out when they catch these guys. Remember in the old days when one would get strapped to a mast and lashed? Well, today worldwide they should sentence them to fifty kicks in the groin for a first offense and a hundred for the second, two hundred for the third and castration for the fourth. Ready and willing citizens should be allowed to line up outside of the courthouse so they could carry out the sentence. The bailiff could come outside and say, "OK, we've got a first offender here. First fifty come on in," and we'd each get a three step running start before punting the malefactor's huevos all the way to Tahiti. They should televise it too. I bet that'd force a quick reduction in the number of these scams and folks' could start trusting their correspondence again. End or Rant. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

You probably can't unless you want to strip off all of the siding and redo the WRB under the siding. Try using some TSP or maybe an industrial cleaner to remove the grunge without removing the paint and periodically re-clean it. The Dollar Tree store sells a product called Awsome Orange - $1 for a half gallon - that's every bit as good as the stuff I can get in the big orange box store or at the corner auto parts store for five or six times the price. I spent about $50 for about 11 gallons of water-based parts cleaner/degreaser for my 20-gallon parts cleaner at the auto parts store. When I went to refill it, I bought $40 worth of Awsome Orange and discovered that it is every bit as effective as the high-priced stuff for less than half the price. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Ian, They won't ask that if you simply prepare the client for that and tell the client to prep the agent. I rarely get done with any inspection in less than four hours. The house could be the size of my truck and I'd still take that long, so I make sure they know it when they book the job. I tell 'em to prepare to be there for at least four hours. When they say OK, I then add, "Now, make sure your agent knows that, because most agents that don't know me think that they're going to be in and out in about two to two-and-a-half hours. That ain't gonna happen. When I say at least four hours I mean just that. If the agent starts bugging me at three-and-a-half hours and wants to know why I'm not done yet he (she) is probably not going to like what I say to 'em. You need to make sure your agent is prepared for that; and, if you want to have an agent there for the entire inspection and the agent can't be there for the entire time, make sure your agent arranges to have another agent there for you." It's your show; not their's. When they bug you simply come back with, "I'm going to be here as long as it takes to do this job right. You do want me to do a proper and thorough inspection don't you?" The stubborn one's will come back with something like, "Well, my regular inspector never takes so long," to which you simply respond, "Well, I'm not your inspector, I'm his (hers)," and point to the client. The hemming and hawing and the tap dance they do at that point can be pretty comical. You have to understand that to 'zoids we are simply an unfortunate impediment to their transaction. If current convention didn't dictate that they do, 'zoids would never even bother to tell buyers that they should get an inspection. 'zoids don't see us as professionals with stature equal to their own. To them we are tradespeople on a level with the guy that rides that trash truck in the early morning, grabs the bag out of your bin and tosses it up into the truck. There's a huge difference between a 'zoid and a true real estate agent. True real estate agents can see beyond the date they're going to deposit the commission check in their bank accounts - the 'zoid can't see any farther than his next flashy new car or watch or next vacation in cabo; and when you disturb his (her) chi by insisting on doing a thorough job you are, to them, being extremely rude. A true real estate professional doesn't care how long you are there as long as you do the job right and take good care of the client. I know many such agents and unlike the 'zoids they stick with you through thick and thin; regardless of whether you "kill" a deal or not, because they want what's best for their clients and know what's good for the client is ultimately best for them. It's your profession; your reputation; and your home and livelihood if you screw it up. Don't allow some schmuck with his (her) head tucked firmly up the anus put you off your game. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Forced hot air hydronic ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Well, They only "give" you work if you buy into that old I have to get referrals from real estate agents or I'll never work paradigm. Stop thinking of them as benefactors and start thinking of them as facilitators - the folks who only have to unlock the door so you can get in and get to work, and then who need to go and sit down and leave you alone with your client. When agents start their caterwauling, tell 'em to go sit in their cat box and leave you alone with your client. Got rules in your COE or SOP about divulging anything about the inspection to anyone except your client? If so, use it to your advantage by telling the agent to go sit down. When they create a stink, point out that you'd prefer that they leave you alone to do your thing with your client and that your SOP and/or COE prohibits you from discussing the inspection in front of anyone except your client without the client's permission. Then look directly at the client and leave it up to the client to make the decision as to whether or not the agent can tag along. More times than not, the client will take your side and tell the agent to take a powder. If the client allows the agent to tag along, say, "That's fine, but don't interrupt me during my interaction with my client. I've got a lot to look at here today and he (she) and I need to concentrate on the task at hand." Always emphasize that you are there for the client and not the agent and make sure the agent gets it loud and clear. Buyers aren't stupid. They can see and sense when an inspector is inwardly fretting about where the next job will come from if he/she doesn't placate an agent. They might never say anything to you about it, and might not ever say anything to anyone else, but if they sense that you're holding back even a little bit because you're worried you won't get future referrals from that agent they'll probably look for a different guy next time. When they eventually find the guy who they sense only cares about them, and couldn't give two fairy farts about what an agent thinks, they'll always go with that guy. Work for the client, ignore the agent. Thank the clients profusely for sending their business to you - even if the clients were referred by the agent - and make sure that when you send the report to them you thank them again for allowing you the privilege of helping them to investigate the condition of their prospective new home. Make sure you voice the hope that they were happy with the inspection and will be more so when they've had a chance to read the report. Ask them to tell their relatives, friends and co-workers about their positive experience with your company, if they are happy with the end product, and let them know that just because they've paid you doesn't mean you are gone - you are always available to them via phone or email if they have any questions. Getting repeat referrals from clients to outnumber referrals from agents is like building a house out of legos; it doesn't go quick - it's one tiny piece at a time. Keep this in mind also; when an agent blabs around his/her office about the lousy experience they had with so-and-so inspector there will always be some agents in that office within earshot that aren't 'zoids who will know in their heart that the other agent is a tool. They will be agents who prefer an honest inspector. They'll remember your name. Meanwhile, your happy customers will tell everyone they know about the inspector who really worked his/her ass off for them and clearly wasn't worried about getting referrals from the agent. After a while when customers call up to book an appointment some will tell you, "I actually have heard about you from several different friends who've bought homes over the years and were very happy with the job you did for them." You'll have done it all without ever entering a realtor's office, without giving them any candy, pens or coffee cups or other suck-up trinkets to get them to refer you to their clients; and, most of all, without putting up with their bullshit. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

My Mom is retired and living in a retiree community in Florida. She's got a metal roof on her home. She's one of the only folks left in her development that hasn't added another roof above the first. Just about every house in there has had a new sloped roof framed up over the top. Most are composition but a few were tile and some were metal. Her roof was leaking. She was about to go out and blow $15K to have a new roof framed up over her home. I told her not to do it, called my younger brother and told him to get down there, got on a plane and flew down there. In four days we stripped that old roof using the same stuff they use to strip the paint off of aluminum aircraft skin, burnished it, taped up all of the seams with acrylic-faced peel-n-seal, and then went over it with several coats of a white acrylic coating. It formed a hard acrylic skin that was very durable. We bought the stripper from an aviation maintenance supplier and the peel-n-seal and big five gallon buckets of that acrylic from a place that provides supplies to companies that do services on mobile homes. Total cost was less than $500 including my round-trip ticket from Seattle to Tampa. I guess it's been about four or five years and she hasn't had any trouble with it. The white reflects well and keeps her home cooler than it used to be. Since the initial peel-n-seal used on the seams was about 35 years old when we stripped it and she's in her 80's, she wasn't too concerned about longevity of the stuff we applied but I think it's goint to hold up at least as long as the original. When the rest of the thing collapses from old age that roof will probably still be pretty good. She has a handy guy climb up there once a year with a mop, a bucket of water and some spic-n-span. He cleans the dirt film off, rinses it off with a garden hose and it's good for another year. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike