Chris Bernhardt

Lot of we language and passive constructions in that Cramer example. I have a question for Hausdok, take for example an unprofessional roof installation, you have talked about the need to record enough information to remind us what we saw that day if need be months down the road, and given the admonishment to keep it short and sweet, how do you record the details? Just keep them to your self in your personal notes and leave them out of the report? Chris, Oregon

What's the recommendation on undercut foundations? What about the situation where someone has excavated vertically next to the footer with in the cone of compression? Image Insert: 85.99 KB Chris, Oregon

Thanks Jim, I could have gone another nine years and not figured that out. I obvious haven't done so in the first nine. Thats the kind of insight I have been looking for. How do you handle the situation I described where parties are demanding you defend your opinion with some details? My guess is to not say anything more then what your recommendation was, am I right? Chris, Oregon

It's MS Word. The building of the report is complicated but I have a lot of macros that do some of the heavy lifting. I have to do it my way. If it wasn't for that I would be using InspectExpress. It would save me a lot of trouble but I am stuck on using that table format for listing the items of the inspection. Chris, Oregon

No, but I have had more then one lawyer(They were clients actually) compliment me that I presented that crap like that. Go figure. Particularly what they liked about it was that it was all in one section and not spread out through the report. It's because of those couple experiences I am having difficulty jettisoning all that disclaimer crap. I got the "messed up" phrase from Jim K. Maybe Jim will explain its proper use. It gets boring being so formal all of the time. "The strainer in the bathtub drain is damaged/missing" I got lazy and said it's busted. Oh yea, the strikeout thing. My intention was to list all of the items in the Oregon SOP. Where it was not applicable I decided to strike it out to give it more emphasis. I know it's weird. I have thought about not doing that and just listing the item as N/A. Chris, Oregon

Thanks Chad. What you said was very useful. I bolded the phrases that particularly struck me. I have seen master Katen take that approach but what you said adds another perspective for me. I know I went way too far with the details. The seller who is supposedly a licensed contractor was challenging everything I had verbally told my client on this one. My experience has been in case like this if I write the short and sweet version the client initially nods his head then later the selling side comes back with all that BS about how who ever installed the roof is a licensed contractor blah blah blah and the inspector is crazy cause he can't even support his opinion with any facts. Trickles back to the client who then calls me to ask me to try explain the facts then the client says can you please call the seller and explain to him what you just explained to me! Ok, go ahead and tell why I wrong to think this way. Chris, Oregon

Thanks Mike for the tips. Captain, yes the findings are bit busy and crowded. Chris, Oregon

The table of contents that you refer to just covers all the disclaimer crap I wish I could jettison. Never really ever had a table of contents for the report. Seems silly. It's not a book. You don't use them either when you are writing engineering papers. All mine clients seem care about is the findings and the pics so thats why, Kapow, they're right after the cover page. Explain to me why I should have a table of contents for such a small document? Do you think clients go looking for the TOC when then get the report? Do people read instructions before they start putting the christmas toys together? Your right. it would be nice if the pics followed in order of the findings instead of the order I shot them in. It would be less confusing. I have thought about that but just haven't had the time to write a macro to put things in order. Jim K. gave high marks for PictureDrop. I have just not had the time to play with it. I need a way to reference from the findings to the pics and vice a versa. What do you suggest? Right now its goto pic 4 on page 5. And if you happened to start with the picture pages the caption kinda indicates the item in the finding section. Do you think instead of repeating pics 1 - 8 that I should number them 1 thru X so that the findings reference would say see pic 27 instead of pic 4 on page 5? Also can you be more specific as to what body you refer to? Are you refering to the findings or the disclaimer section cause the disclaimer section is really just baggage. The heart of the report is the findings and the pics. Chris, Oregon

Ok, Mike. Thanks for deleting that. I reuploaded the file. I guess you guys can have at me when it appears. Chris, Oregon

Oops, Mike can you delete that file. And I will replace it with one without the some information thats not suppose to be there. Built the dam thing wrong, crap! Chris, Oregon

Ok, a sacrificial lamb has arrived. I finally got one of my recent reports uploaded to the file manager in the sample reports section. Now you can beat me up. Chris, Oregon

Mike, how do we upload a sample report for comment? How big a PDF file can we load? The best I can do is get one shrunk down to under 750K with all of the pics in it. Chris, Oregon

Oops, sorry if I implied that, didn't mean that. I think Bain said it well. Were just talking about employing whatever means works. Some people don't get it unless you show them a picture. Thats what I was trying to say. Think about it, with googlization why does anyone have to learn anything the traditional way. When they need to know something they can google it! - coming scourge, Google mentality? I think my kids are coming down with that disease. Chris, Oregon

When I was a budding engineer a company from Europe named Lecroy came out with the first practical digital ocilliscope and it was twice the cost of the ol textronix analog work horse. My boss and I showed all the ol farts this new way of doing things and they scoffed and snorted that you don't need all that fancy crap your just wasting the companies money. Fast forward 5 years later and all of the analog scopes were in the trash heep and you couldn't pry one of those Lecroys from an ol farts cold dead hands. We have gotten by just fine on the old ways. You hear it all of the time. Using pictures to communicate solves a problem. It's just a tool in our bag of communication goodies. I am sure that I am not the first one to say this but I can imagine a day where the current way of communicating the findings of the inspection will be web based in a garden of hyperlinks to useful information should the client wish to pursue it. I see the trend that people care less and less about learning about a home and how it works. They just want to know whats wrong and who do they call to fix it. Chris, Oregon

Necessity is the mother of invention. I have historically had a lot of clients who can't attend the inspection and a lot more that are not proficient in english. Without a judicious use of pictures how do you propose to communicate the issues? Even if my clients understood english and attended the inspection at least for the walk and talk they still often have to communicate the findings to others. It maybe a market thing. I imagine on higher end homes that they tend to negotiate price where as on the low end they tend to negotiate repairs. I often don't have the luxury of doing a traditional walk & talk with my clients. Don't presume just because a client has hired you for an inspection that they want all that walky talky stuff because some don't or could really careless. What are you going to do, take a client up on a roof, in an attic, or through a crawlspace? What you are saying is that all clients will understand properly written narrative and that is simply not true. Chris, Oregon

I can't tell you how many times when I am going over my findings with a client and they have no idea what a GFCI receptacle is. Would I take a picture of it? It depends on who my client was. I tend to take more pics for older clients and definitely for non-english speakers. Most grandmas and grandpas won't read the report. They will have their sons and daughters do it for them and what will the sons and daughters use to explain things back? The pictures! But another point I need to make clear, I am not advocating pics over narrative. I wish I could upload my report format so you could see what I mean. Chris, Oregon

I have never had that experience and thats just not logical. I got a call from a realtor on a recent inspection it turns out that the house had just been inspected by somebody before me who didn't call a bunch of stuff. I asked him if the sellers were disputing anything extra that I had called. He replied "no, it's hard to argue with pictures." Chris, Oregon

Well I said comic book model. All my pics are captioned and annotated. There is a minor amount of duplication with my list of findings. I take a lot of pics and when I sit down with a client we basically go right to the pics and start talking. I usually have 8 pics a page and page after page of pics. I knew that some would disagree with the pic in with the narrative as its a popular approach in many report writer programs but all that text surrounding the pic is confusing to clients. I know you won't believe me. I believe more information is conveyed much more quickly by using pics and I don't mean a single pic of the issue. I might take several pics of an issue to try an comunicate it. Think making a movie. Our world is going so video. Big blocks of narrative in relation to a single pic is boring. Why? Because people have learned that they have to slow down and be careful when reading narrative and then have to work hard at deciphering what the inspector has written via all that passive, vague wording. A pic lets their minds run free - to find Waldo. I have tried to upload a copy of my report format but can't. How big a file can we upload? I think my file size is about 1.5meg. Chris, Oregon

I have a dirty little secret. Between the time I left engineering and was prepairing to enter the home inspection biz I worked as a realtors assistant for a heavy hitter. I got to see first hand lots of HI reports and the reaction that clients and realtors had to them. Back then reports were almost always check list style, no pics and hand written (scribbled) comments. The reports were extremely light and almost never contained more then clean the moss off of the roof and clean the gutters. Realtor friendly crap. One thing that hasn't changed much is the organization of HI reports. They are horrible! If one has a particular question one usually has to dig thru the report page by page. Even though these reports have a purported table of contents realtors and clients usually need set aside a good hour to read the reports and put together their own list because the reports are so unordered! You can write your report anyway you want but this is what I suggest - Make an ordered (numbered) list of your findings and present it first thing in your report. In your list, each list item should be cross referrenced to the pictures and any other necessary information. Don't put pics mixed in with text. Use the comic book format. In other words throw all your pics on picture pages right after your list of findings. Organizing this way you could have a dozen people on the phone discussing the report and easily staying on the same page. See item 35 on page 4, now go to picture 8 on page 7. Right now somehow has say go to page 14 and look somewhere near the middle of the page it says... have your found it? uhh, I am still looking. Chris, Oregon

What version of MS Word are you using? I think I have what your asking for but there's a bit of code involved to create a cascading menu system and I don't have my perfected but you can use it as a starting point. Chris, Oregon

Another house with amateur tile work in the front entry and master bedroom bathroom shower. When I looked at the floor under the shower I could see the original drain fitting so what ever they did they didn't start with a new pan etc. Amateur tile work makes me real nervous. There is no way for me to verify workmanship past what I can see but if I can tell that its amateur work just by looking at the tiles then most probably the workmanship is too. At the start of this post I asked do you comment on it. Hausdok and Kurt M. said they did. My follow up question is then what is the written recommendation? Have an expert tile contractor take a look at it. Get his opinion and costs in case this work has to be redone? Chris, Oregon

That is a good point John. I agree that Tbirds statement is weak and maybe if a real plumber had seen the report or did the repair he would have seen the other problem, they usually do, but another point I would ask Tbird is did you stop looking at the plumbing once you detected a leak and found what you thought was the problem? For example once I found a dishwasher that I couldn't run because the latch didn't work. I stupidly wrote that the latch didn't work and needed repair. Well the whole dishwasher didn't work! After that I was more careful about following thru on whether or not I could complete an evaluation on something. My point is that if one starts their evaluation of something and has to terminate it short of completion then you need to state that fact and recommend that the evaluation be completed, right? Chris, Oregon

You would think that the insulation contractors would be running around with thermal cameras offering free inspections to drum up biz. I think in the end there won't be any premium biz when the cameras become more afordable. But it's a sure bet that sooner rather than later they will become an expected tool in the HI's bag just like a moisture meter. Do you think that someone will propose a change to an SOP? With the expected use of moisture meters and thermal cameras, is it really a visual only inspection anymore? Chris, Oregon

Yea, it's sad but true. I was thinking though after my last post that even though my doctor might send me to get an MRI he would arrange for a follow up visit go over the results. If an HI says to have something evaluated then he better follow it up with either - tell them to fix any problems they find or get back to me with the results so I can make a recommendation on what to do next. Chris, Oregon.

You would think that anything that an inspector said in the report should be interpreted as possibly being a problem. So if an inspector said to have something further evaluated then that would be a clue that there is most probably a problem that needs to be considered. But what I have read here is that it is not how it gets interpreted and maybe things for evaluation get filtered out or glossed over by clients and their realtors. Its been said here a number of times that its imperative to not just say evaluate but to fix any problems found. If an HI says "have something evaluated cause it don't look right", why does the implication not follow to get any problems found repaired? If my doctor told me to go get and MRI, why would I think to leave it at that? Chris, Oregon