kurt

Is that reclaimed brick? Even if it's not reclaimed, it's soft brick and hard mortar. Bad combo. This will continue, and get worse.

Same here. Never seen one below a basement floor. Ever. A gas tank under a garage floor once. Since it's right next to the water service, is it the old tile access "buffalo box", for the old water shut off?

No, not a tank, looks like an old toilet flange....(?) and the vent?

Yes. I can't imagine it being any more than a fraction of a fraction per cent of their business, I can easily imagine them getting burned by a few hundred incompetent HI's over the years ("the check's in the mail"), they mfg. to meet (likely teeny) demand, and could give a shit about complaints.

Fire wall separation. Odd shape, but the reasoning could probably be determined by the layout below. All those old demising walls meandering up through the roofs of apartments were fire separations.

It's not exclusive to the East. We have 17 year Cicadas here too, although they are on a different 17 year schedule; I have no idea why. We had a major blast in about 1989, and another in 2006 or thereabouts. It's freaky when they get going.

I seem to recall folks talking about different technologies many years ago, but it never made much impression on me then. S'funny how things get going in a direction, even though it might not be the best direction.

That's my curiosity; they don't kill grass, they just leave exit holes. Other than the dead grass, it looks just like cicadas and this is the year.

Cicadas leave a hole about that size, and when they come out, there's millions of them. You're in prime cicada country.

There's the about face conundrum, and then there's the very simple market and distribution channel momentum. It takes a while for the aircraft carrier to turn. I've been including a brief pitch in every report about the new alarms for about 6 months.

Without knowing more, I'm betting you still have the original gravity duct system. Are there big (12"-18" diameter) ducts in the basement, or duct boots of that size? Are the supplies on interior walls, behind doors, or located in weird locations? Is there a big return at the bottom of the stairs? If yes to any of these questions, you're working on an old gravity system. They don't transition to modern equipment particularly well. It's not uncommon to have some of those old ducts literally falling apart and rusted away in the walls; you may be conditioning the stud cavities instead of the rooms.

The setup you're seeing is pretty common in 4-12 unit apartment buildings. Regardless of listing, most of these are tapped out, there's usually new appliances and devices not counted in the original configuration, and the room air conditioners usually found in the apartments aren't on dedicated circuits. Not to mention the tangle of AC/BX that's coming out of the top of the panels; can't run that stuff in lengths >6' in the city. It's real easy to can these arrangements on multiple counts. The (too small) panels are only part of the problem. Most often, the building service is only 200 amps.

It's recyclable and sustainable. What's the problem?

Jim, I'm amazed there's another home inspector who knows who Billy Collins is.

Or five, or six, or a dozen. That photo pretty much encapsulates what I look at half the time.

How much energy I put into repairing it depends on a lot of stuff. I've been staring at one wall of my bungalow for 22 years that looks like the wall section in the pics; I raked out the mortar that caused the problems, and it's stayed pretty much the same for two decades. I suppose one day I may get inspired to chop out the bad bricks and replace them. Or not. I restored the front wall the right way. Someday I hope to get to the stuff no one sees.

It doesn't look all that bad; the problem is the mortar, not the brick. Rake out the dipsquat "tuckpointing", and everything would probably be fine.

I thought methane was odorless & colorless. That's why they needed the canary in the coal mine. While looking it up, I came across this in a coal mining related site.... A "black damp" is a mix of carbon dioxide and nitrogen caused by corrosion, a process that can cause suffocation by drawing the oxygen from the air. An "after damp" includes the same gases as a black damp, plus carbon monoxide, and usually forms after a mine explosion. A "fire damp" is particularly dangerous, because it consists mainly of methane, a flammable gas. A "stink damp," which reeks of rotten eggs, is mostly hydrogen sulfide. This gas, too, can explode. A "white damp" is any air containing carbon monoxide, a gas that has no discernable scent but is toxic in even low concentrations. On occasion, I am a source of toxic gas in enclosed spaces (my Carharts)....it sometimes has me wondering if I'm getting out alive.

That is almost verbatim what I tell my customers, even when I'm inspecting a pool. Inspecting pools is a hit or miss proposition.

For the most part, I tell people to get someone else to inspect the pool, but sometimes I do them. It's only a pool. It's not all that complicated. Sounds like we all do the electrical, which is probably the most complicated and important part. Pool equipment is either new, or it will be soon. Seems like stuff is always crapping out. Decks and liners always have something wrong, somewhere; find it, and tell them to repair it. I put big glaring statements about pool maintenance in the comments; pools are all about maintenance. When they fail, it's because someone wasn't doing something. I tell people to get a pool service, because I was sure they (my customers) weren't going to keep up with it....they laughed, agreed, and got a service.

That is one cool piece of machinery.

Huge pent up demand; lots of people on the sidelines with dry powder waiting to take a shot, they sensed the market had bottomed, now they're in. Louisville is a big city with a decent economy, and folks need housing. It's America, people want to own their home.

In the Midwest, developers name streets after the trees that they bulldoze.

Same here. Maybe the official line is metal over comp shingles is OK, but I've only ever seen it be a mess. The exposed fastener thing is the kicker; it just shouldn't have been done. I'm sticking with the cretin implication.

The clear implication is there is a cretin involved, maybe several cretins.