hausdok

Hell Brandon, that's OK. We're all so old that we're suffering from alzheimers (Or is it old-timers) disease anyway and won't remember having posted it. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Kevin, I too understood what you were saying, but you and I work with this stuff every day and most buyers don't. They're usually so overwhelmed with the whole home buying process that loading them up with a lot of complicated text can almost literally fry their brains and turn them into sobbing idiots. Kurt made some good points, less techno-jargon is better. How about this? Tell them what and where. You said: How about: I saw evidence of a rodent infestation in the crawlspace - rat droppings and urine spots all over the vapor barrier in the crawlspace, torn and soiled insulation and a few rat carcasses - some obviously recently expired. It's obvious that this is an active infestation.id="blue"> Tell 'em why it's bad for you or the house. You said: How about: If they've infested the crawlspace, they'll eventually infest the entire house, unless something is done about it. Some rodents carry hantavirus pulmonary syndrome HPS), a rare disease with a high mortality rate, so you're not going to want to be exposed to their urine or droppings or dust from old droppings. id="blue"> Tell them what to do about it. You said: How about: Have a reputable professional exterminator block any points of entry for rodents into the crawlspace and eliminate any remaining rodents. Then have a company that specializes in crawlspace cleanup, remove all contaminated materials or droppings and replace the vapor barrier if necessary. Finally, make sure that you wear breathing protection whenever you enter your crawlspace. For more information about HPS, visit the CDC website on the internet at http://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/diseases/hantavirus.htm. id="blue"> As far as conventions to highlight the issue go, it's a matter of taste. When I helped a software company formulate their inspection program, we went to a lot of trouble to design a means for a home inspector to create and customize conventions whichever way that he or she wanted, in order to highlight an issue. I've gotten away from using conventions myself. It's too confusing. Why have the client stop reading, in order to go somewhere else in the report to leaf through a bunch of additional text, thus losing his/her train of thought. Instead, I just bold a title for the entry. In its entirety, this comment would look like: ----------------- A rodent infestation needs to be eliminated: I saw evidence of a rodent infestation in the crawlspace - rat droppings and urine spots all over the vapor barrier in the crawlspace, torn and soiled insulation and a few rat carcasses - some obviously recently expired. It's obvious that this is an active infestation. If they've infested the crawlspace, they'll eventually infest the entire house, unless something is done about it. Some rodents carry hantavirus pulmonary syndrome HPS), a rare disease with a high mortality rate, so you're not going to want to be exposed to their urine or droppings or dust from old droppings. Have a reputable professional exterminator block any points of entry for rodents into the crawlspace and eliminate any remaining rodents. Then have a company that specializes in crawlspace cleanup, remove all contaminated materials or droppings and replace the vapor barrier if necessary. Finally, make sure that you wear breathing protection whenever you enter your crawlspace. For more information about HPS, visit the CDC website on the internet at http://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/diseases/hantavirus.htm. ------------------- ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Kurt, Yeah, I said essentially the same thing. Prach pointed out that if a home inspector did nothing but heat exchanger inspections and everyone else around, including other inspectors doing the typical home inspection, were to refer those to him/her, the inspector would probably make a whole lot more, with less liability incurred, than doing regular inspections, because the inspector doesn't have to do anything but open it up, confirm the damage and then hand it off. I can understand it, but I guess that the only way that it would work - given the current way that most of the codes of practice are formulated - is for the inspector to sell the heat exchanger inspection up-front, while booking the inspection, and only to expect payment for that aspect of it if he/she actually does find a damaged exchanger. Otherwise, he/she could be accused of an ethical violation for up-selling or for pushing additional services. Tricky question. Is anyone reading this actually currently pulling blowers to inspect exchangers? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Kurt, Yeah, I see it done on newer condos out here all the time. It's usually part of a layered wall system wherein the drywall is placed behind the OSB, the whole thing is wrapped and then the siding goes on. I've never bothered to ask why. I always assumed it was some kind of firewall engineering. They typically use an exterior grade drywall, and, unless the flashings at penetrations has been done poorly, it seems to work fine. Sometimes I find it flipped the other way with the drywall on the outside of the lamina. In fact, I believe that the the building I'm living in is done exactly that way. There are a whole lot of little 1,000 sq. ft. post WWII houses around here that were built for GI's after the war that are sheathed with an exterior-grade drywall that has a black paper facing. In most cases, it's held up for more than 50 years and still going strong. Of course, those aren't sided with vinyl though. How many of you knew that drywall has been around for just about 105 years now? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Randy, Go here or here. I'd be surprised if you couldn't find what you needed there. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, John makes a good point, you might have a cracked heat exchanger. Or, it might be something else - like a dead bird or rodent that's fallen into the vent and become wedged between sections of the chamber. Yesterday, I put in a call to Ellis Prach, the Heat Exchanger Expert, because I'd had an interesting situation the day before with a Lennox G-12. He called me back last night and we had a fascinating discussion about heat exchanger longevity. He makes a pretty good case for why we inspectors should consider at least sliding out blower cages to do a penetration test. After that talk, I'm not sure that I'm ever going to trust my visual on a furnace again. If you've got sufficient technical skills to do it without damaging your furnace, slide out that blower and take a look, Martin. It can't hurt. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Kurt, I'm not saying don't have a spirited discussion. It's a fascinating debate, everyone is making some great points, and I for one don't want to see this discussion end, because this is a topic that we all know needs to be out there, but it looks like it could be on the cusp of, well...you know. I'm just saying it would be a shame if such a valuable topic takes an unpleasant turn, so I'm asking everyone to keep it alive by choosing their words carefully. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Okay Fellows, Let's mind our manners. This is TIJ, not one of those other boards. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi, Yeah, that's my understanding too. No reductions in direction of flow with the exception of the 3" by 4" closet flange. OT - OF!!! M.

Man-o-man, New-age hippies are invading TIJ! OT - OF!!! M.

Never had a problem with them. Of course, I've never seen one either....ever. Must be a regional thing. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Randy, While I agree that reporting cosmetic stuff is not in our mandate, you need to look at this from another angle. This isn't really a costmetic issue that can be wall-papered over, cleaned or painted, it's an issue that says, "Look at me, I've been carelessly assembled. What else am I hiding?" If you bought a new Lexus and the trim was installed backwards, wouldn't you hope that the dealer would see that and fix it? If you hired a mechanic to check the car over for you, wouldn't you want him to tell you about it so that you didn't look like a dork driving a car with the trim installed wrong? That house costs a lot more than a Lexus. The least they could have done was to get the balusters correct. Considering the fact that inspectors end up in court all the time for allegedly not doing a thorough enough job on a home, noticing something as easy as this is to fix, recommending that it gets corrected and putting it in your report, could demonstrate during any future litigation that, not only were you paying attention to even small details, but you weren't pulling punches just to assuage the feelings of any realtor who was on site, in order to preserve your future referrals. On the other hand, not mention it and record it, and a homeowner bent on suing you for allegedly not finding something, might produce a photo of this and say to a judge, "Look at this photograph of the stair railings in my home. This wasn't included in the report either, and clearly shows that the inspector was either not carefully inspecting the home or he intentionally avoided mentioning this because he didn't want to look like he was being picky and risk not getting future referrals from my realtor. Heck Judge, I wanted him to be picky. If he didn't report this, what else didn't he report besides the issue I'm in court about today?." You could end up looking like the bad guy. Besides, most of us are cranky - with darned good reason - the 'zoids and their facilitators are constantly trying to undermine our efforts to do a truly professional job and are foisting their expectations of what an inspector should be and how he/she should inspect on the profession, instead of leaving us alone to decide that among ourselves. Ah, I could go on forever. I gotta get off my soapbox and get some work done. Later, Dudes and Dudettes. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Again, I'm on board with Jim. I describe the scope of what I'm seeing as clearly as possible. Then I recommend they get in a professional exterminator to repair all vent screens, block all access points, make sure all hatches are repaired and fit tightly, eliminate any rodents that remain and then remove and replace any soiled barriers and insulation. The 8-plex I did last week had a crawlspace that was so low that the inspector that'd inspected the building for another buyer had refused to enter it. I not only got into it, I crawled 100% of the perimeter, circumnavigating a flooded low area in the center, past several rodent carcasses and so many droppings that I described them in the report as "a field" of rodent droppings. It was literally the best word I think I could have used to convey the degree to which that crawl was infested. The buyer, whose bought several investment properties - some worse than this one - was okay with it. He just needed to know how bad it was so he'd know what he'd need to spend to fix it. However, I've found that some folks - especially me - have zero tolerance to anything vermin related - particularly rats - and as soon as they hear that there's been a rat infestation they don't want anything to do with a house. I don't think there's any way to know how severely some folks will react to rodents, so I think it's necessary to make sure they've got as clear a picture as possible. If I see carcasses, I report them - even if they're nothing more than a bare skeleton, the same thing when I find urine puddles or soiled insulation - even when I think they've been eliminated. Glossing over rodent issues could very well be one of those things that could easily come back to bite an inspector badly. Hmmmm, maybe I should re-print the story about the vapor barrier that collapsed under me years ago. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Randy, No worries. The quality of roof work around here is so bad that you'll never find a roofer that will ever criticize whether the tabs face the valley or face away from the valley. Believe me, I've argued with hundreds of them. Just about every one I've ever met had has head tucked so far up his bottom that he'd need to go to the proctologist to get his teeth capped. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi, I've got two sets of coveralls, lots of nitrile gloves, a stocking cap, hell, even a painters head sock, a respirator with P100 filter and ratty old shoes to wear in crawls. If I have to crawl over/through it to get the job done, I do. I draw the line at human waste though. There just isn't anything as nasty as a crawl full of human excrement and there's always so much of it. Bleaaaacccchhhhhh! OT - OF!!! M.

I dunno, I pulled some 85 year old cedar off the entire side of a building about 6 years ago and the only thing behind it was rosin paper. The paper was in great shape and still protecting the one-by sheathing behind it. Of course, that siding had been back-primed, as it should have been, before installation, so the primer might have limited the effect any extractives from the cedar might have had on the paper. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Chris, I usually do comment about it when I find the tabs lining the valley and they haven't been gooped to prevent stuff that's sliding down the valley from building up underneath them. It's easy to illustrate. One can usually slip a finger under an uplifted tab and pull out a bunch of pine needles, maple tree seeds and other flotsam. However, at the same time I point out that I only rarely find them actually leaking and I'm careful to closely examine the underside of the valley from the attic, or the ceilings beneath when I can't get into an attic or there is no attic, for any signs of leakage due to improperly placed nails or improperly lapped underlayment, etc.. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

In order to ensure that our readers aren't inadvertently missing useful information, and to make it easier for TIJ's member's to post information to the site, we've eliminated the Free Online Education Forum, that had been located in the Association and Training Forums area, and have rolled all of the posts in that category into a single Free Downloads and Training Resources forum under the Technical Forums Category. The added benefit to TIJ's readers, is that all information about free online sites now posted to the site by our members will be automatically added to our e-mailed newsletter, so that newsletter subscribers who don't visit the forums frequently will automatically be informed of, and receive links to, these sites when they receive their newsletters. This has effectively doubled the size of the forum containing information about free downloads, so readers are encouraged to visit the Free Downloads and Online Training Resources forum and review all past postings, in order to ensure that they haven't missed any valuable information that they'd not noticed before due to the redundancy of the two separate categories. Ed.

Hi, It's not a "Long-Island" valley. They might tend to call it that where you are, but it's actually what's known as an "Alternate Closed Cut" valley and it should have been done as I said, for the very reason that you pointed out - that the shingle tabs tend to capture debris. It's done constantly here with architectural-grade shingles and, because those don't have tabs to capture debris and only the joints between shingles butted together at the ends, they typically don't flip them around and leave the laminated section abutting the valleys. However, when it's done with 3-tab, the shingle should be flipped so that the tabs aren't in the valley. I say should be because they usually are not, due to the color difference. You're right, with a conventional closed-cut valley they're supposed to adhere the cut edge of the overlapping shingles in a 2-inch wide bed of goop. With an alternative closed cut valley where the tabs are facing the valley, gooping the corners down is certainly neater, but if the proper width underlayment has been used under that valley and there aren't any fasteners closer than 6 inches to the valley centerline, the likelihood of leakage is pretty remote without the goop. I know that, because I'm in a fairly rainy part of the country. We've had more than 14 inches so far in November this year (But, then again, I guess you are too). It's virtually never done here yet roofs seem to handle it well. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Yes, cut valleys are quite common. The upper watershed side should be the cut side with the lower watershed side continuing beneath the surface. The layer of shingles lining the valley on the cut side should have been flipped around so that the tabs were beneath the upper-watershed shingles, leaving a long edge with 1/3 the number of potential trap points. That's rarely done because the other side of the shingle is a different color and the roofers don't want to answer the inevitable question about color differences. The cut should be two inches back from the valley centerline and the upper corner of the upper watershed shingles - the corner that you can't see because it's concealed by the overlaps - should have been nipped off before application. It looks like that cut line is directly down the centerline of the valley. You can obtain a free manual and obtain free certification from Certainteed in their Master Shingle Applicator program by clicking here. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Tom, if I might digress for a second. Maybe you're asking simply from a curiosity standpoint, but maybe because your own state has stringent asbestos rules and you feel they should be everywhere, in order to prevent people from getting sick from asbestos. Well, for the benefit of those who don't know, it's be pretty hard to ingest asbestos from asbestos-cement siding. The manufacturing process encapsulates the asbestos fiber in cement and then there's the inevitable paint applied to the surface. Together, there's almost no way to get the stuff airborne and separated again. Even when you bust up a building with the stuff installed, the stuff breaks off into heavy sand-like particles that aren't likely to get airborne with anything short of a hurricane. I suppose that an industrial person bent on suicide could grind up one of the shingles to fine powder, lay out a few lines of asbestos-cement powder and then snort them - hoping to ingest a fiber or two - and then wait 25 years for them to metastasize - but by then there's no way to know whether it was the ground-up shingle that got him, or the dust cloud he passed through and breathed driving down the turnpike on that hot summer day, or that time he was standing next to the service manager's desk paying his bill at the auto dealership and one of the guys was blowing out brake drums with an air hose, or when he attended grade school and the heating pipes were wrapped with the stuff and the kids used to pick at it while standing in the cafeteria line, or when he was in the Army as a private buffing hallway floors made of asbestos-asphalt tile with a dry brush, or when he helped his Dad tear down that old unsightly ceiling in the family room when he was 15, or...... When I was a kid, asbestos was more plentiful in building materials than it is now (It's still used in some building products, by the way). I can remember many times helping my Dad as a youngster, using a torch and putty knife to scrape tile adhesive from a basement floor so new tile could be applied, dust blowing everywhere as asbestos acoustic ceiling tiles were cut (acoustic ceilings were popular back then - don't ask me why), tearing off walls of asbestos siding so that additions could be added or doors or windows installed, dust everywhere and nobody wearing a mask. I know that the clean air laws are there to try and eventually get a handle on this stuff and other contaminants, but I think it's, frankly, too little too late. The genie is out of the bottle and there's no getting him back in. I get a chuckle out of the look on clients' faces when I'm inspecting post WWII era homes, shine my light into the heating registers and it reveals that asbestos tape - usually frayed and friable - sealing the boot to the duct below. Sometimes it's the interior of old oil-burning furnaces that are lined with the stuff. Sometimes it's the dried-up, flaking and dusty cement left over on a basement floor where tile had been removed. When I point it out to them and explain what it is, they usually turn a little white and then ask whether it's "normal" to have it. Then, when I explain that it's typical of homes of that age, and point out to them that if they grew up in a home built between WWII and 1965, that there's a chance that the stuff was used in those homes as well and they'd been exposed to it for years. It's not uncommon for them to realize during the inspection that the home that they're living in at the time of the inspection is just such a home. Then I give them a reality check by pointing out to them all of the opportunities they've had to be exposed to the stuff on a daily basis, as above, and explain why they'll continue to be exposed to it, because it's still being used, and it kind of falls into perspective. Sure, asbestos fiber causes cancer in some folks, but not in everyone whose ever been exposed to it or has breathed asbestos fiber. If it did, there'd be no such thing as life insurance, because life insurance companies would have gone belly-up decades ago, and there'd be lines of vehicles backed up at funeral homes, cemeteries, doctors offices and hospitals. The folks that live in Libby, Montana are a good example. The soil there was heavily permeated for decades and everyone breathed the dust created by the vermiculite mine there. Town folk there have an extremely high rate of asbestos-related maladies, compared to the rest of the country, but not everyone in that town got sick. Reassuring someone that they won't ever get an asbestos-related disease if they never purchase a home that's ever had any asbestos materials in it is just plain irresponsible. It makes more sense to let people know that they've been exposed to, and have been breathing, asbestos fibers their entire life, and to make them understand that, regardless of the clean air laws, it's something that probably isn't ever going to change for them or their children. I now return you to your regularly scheduled 'Inspecting a Bank Barn' post. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Barry, That link above for those in doubt doesn't work and takes me to a "you do not have authorized address" page. Do you have a publicly viewable page for that link? Question: Why would you use that comment? Don't you routinely confirm that the plumbing is bonded to the panel and that the system is properly grounded? The only time that I would use a comment like that would be if there was no way I could confirm that the system was grounded, didn't find any bond to the gas line or both. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Kurt, I do. All the time. The complex I live in is a good example. When I moved in here in 1996 I told everyone that the windows were done wrong and there should be head flashings over the windows. Nobody believed me. 5 years ago they had to strip the siding off around every single weather exposed window and door, make repairs and then reclad them...this time using head flashings. I think word is finally getting around to builders that leaving head flashings out - as they've been doing for so many years - is just stupid. More and more, I'm seeing new homes where head flashings have been used where just a few years ago the same builders weren't using them. Last weekend, I took my students for a walk around a neighborhood near the college. Every student had to find one thing visually from the street on every home we looked at. At one construction site, the builder invited everyone in to look around. I was amazed to see, not only head flashings, but also jamsills. It's a mission. Keep at it long enough and word eventually gets around within the construction profession. I just wish it would work that well within this profession. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Steve, That's an interesting observation. A very good friend of mine teaches home inspection. Here's what he recently said to me via e-mail: I can sure relate to that. There've been times that the only thing that's kept me from going under and ending up pitching a tent under an overpass somewhere, or has enabled me to pay my taxes when there hadn't been enough income that month to pay all of the bills, has been my military retirement check. I sure hope you guys are paying attention to the Ellen Rohr articles that I've been posting the last couple of months. That lady has definitely got small businesses figured out and truly offers solutions that can help. Wish I'd known about her when I first got into this business. If I had, a comfortable retirement would probably be looking a whole lot closer than it does right now. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Ezra, It's really good to hear from you. It's been a coon's age since we have. Stop by more often! OT - OF!!! M.