Tom Raymond

If it still smells after nearly three months my guess is that the leak is still active.

Salts. It's essentially the same as efflorescence, the siding gets wet when it rains, the paint prevents it from drying to the exterior, so it dries in and leaves behind anything dissolved in the water.

Yeah, I found that. That's why I deleted my post. Leave it to NY to go overboard. If the detector at my second floor bedrooms goes off I think I'm pretty much fooked.

For me the carriage house would be a days work; minimum 3 hours on site, minimum 3 hours for the report and pics, and if my luck runs consistent - at least 1 1/2 hours on the road. I'm with Fabry on the big house, it'll either be amazing or it'll be a train wreck. Either way it's a long day, two if I have to wade through a half dozen HVAC systems and Lord only knows how many electrical panels. Then easily 6 hours to write it up. So, that's a day for the garage, plus a long day and half (best case scenario) for the big house, and that gets me to hump day. I wouldn't touch it for less than $2400, and I'd feel a whole lot better at $3000. It doesn't matter that it won't take a week to do it, mentally and physically it will feel like it did. Charge accordingly, then take the rest of the week off to recover.

I'd get $400 for the carriage house alone. Add Marc's fee for the main house as a base price, plus Ben's hourly and you might be in the right ball park. Sub out the mechanicals to reputable local contractors. And, plan on spending at least a few days, it is 5 to 7 times the size of typical house. It's nearly a week's work, earn a week's wages. Marc, it would take more than a day to write the report.

If that is to correct grade clearance issues I'd be very concerned about the exterior water proofing details. There's no mud in 3 of the 4 visible head joints. If they can't lay block, they probably can't seal 'em either. It's time for a site meeting with the designer and the builder.

That looks like condensate on the duct, maybe it's red ink from the paper on the insulation or paint from the edges of the OSB.

They need to seal the cores or there will be significant air infiltration at the those locations. An amazing amount of air moves through those cores. A couple inches of spray foam will do the trick. The same thing happens at the top of the wall when block basements get finished off, an 8" block and a 2x6 sill leave about 1 1/2" of the core exposed. That's either an error in the plans or a change order that was poorly thought out. Dumb.

The house I grew up in had a half dozen of these: Click to Enlarge 8.14 KB The detector discs were a bit smaller than this one. After a couple of decades they would give up and the damn things would go off. Loud as hell and the winding would last several minutes. You had to wait it out or replace the disc with a nickel to make it stop. Anyone know the melting point of a nickel? I have 4 younger brothers, you can imagine how many times we set them off intentionally.

Whichever one you choose, your wife will want the other one.

You haven't been in enough foreclosures. I've seen doors and windows removed and furnaces taken. One house, a very angry individual that took a chain saw and removed the exterior wall of the bathroom, seems the bathtub wouldn't fit through the door.

Really, we need calcs and a baseline? Almost every house I looked at last year had a 100K BTU heating system. The age range was nearly a century with square footage from 900 to 2300. Pretty much 'one size fits all'.

Were they original or retrofit? Glass block retros are an incredibly low margin product so they tend to get slapped in. Around here it's very common to wedge a unit in with shims on all four sides, squirt in some mud with a bag and strike it off flush with the opening, a 15-20 minute job including demo and clean up. The good news is that they're cheap, common sizes tend to be under $200 installed.

I think Rob wants to inspect the nets. I'd rather not be there when one 'fails under testing'.

That's what I was thinking, most everything 10 years old in Florida is CMU, awesome capillarity.

You want to see how succinct the EPA really is, go read the lead paint rule. Not the pretty consumer brochure or the contractors guide book, the law as it appears in the Federal Register. The culmination of a decade of work and it reads like the ramblings one would expect in a teenage girl's diary. My professional opinion, my clients get links in the report to the EPA site. My personal opinion, the EPA is a waste of money.

My house was handed down from father to son from 1885 until the last of the line walked away from it in 1996. The septic system that was in service when I bought it was installed in the 1890's and consisted of two chambers, one dry laid stone and the other big wood timbers, and then was piped into the storm sewer (I imagine it was an open ditch when the system was installed). My new system still empties into the storm sewer after the sand filter. My in-law's house was also passed down like this, and the 1920 septic drains directly from the tank into a creek. New septic systems are commonly part of real estate transactions here.

Sounds like a bad bushing. Find a shop that rebuilds electric motors and have them look at it. If your lucky, the repair and the Ebay purchase won't cost more than just buying a new pump in the first place.

It's a dumb device. It would be far more beneficial to teach the occupants to run the water when they run the disposal. And people wonder why common sense is becoming so uncommon.

Just one? I bet there's an internet forum for X10ers.

There are two positives though: The insulation is so poorly installed that it won't be too difficult to remove. And, the foil vapor barrier has so many holes in it that it isn't likely to have caused any significant damage.

A new septic around here is $5-7K. I don't know what the cleanup costs are going to be, but if the RE's just fess up and split the cost they'll both still have money left out of their commissions. Poor bastards. The only septic system I ever commented on had about 30SF of effluent and toilet paper on the lawn around the D box vent. Pretty safe to say that one was broken.

Aren't cedar shingles a rain screen by design? I don't disagree that the drainage plane is a good idea, but I've seen untreated, unpainted, inferior white cedar last a century or more on the coast without any paper under it. It's funny that because the buildings are sheathed in OSB we suddenly need a plastic brillo pad and chemical preservatives to make a 300 year old siding design feasible. Where are the New Englanders? If anybody knows shingles....

The limitation of liability left out successors, heirs, and assigns. I am sure that Homer doesn't want his wife, kids, and mistress liable for his inspections. Dump the late payment stuff, except for the bad check fees. The 'agreement' and 'report' should be dependent upon each other, but they should be separate documents. If you're heavily invested in the software, find a way to make it 'hide' all the blank crap in the checklist. Ask the vendor for help if you can't figure it out. If they can't help then it's time for new software. Follow Kibble's advice. Jim's report is the best looking HI document out there. Scott's right about Homer's writing, he doesn't need the crutch that ugly checklist gives him. He does need to better organize the commentary though. Some items don't seem to fit the sections they are in, especially when I skipped the checklist and went right for the meat of the report. Pictures are good, but make them bigger and clean up the markings so they can be seen. You're not John Madden. Super Duper Inspections, I wish I had thought of that.

An angle grinder. Anything you put on for a patch will just keep popping off as the slab continues to settle, so cut it loose and let it go. The alternative is to pull it out and replace it. Coring it, pumping concrete under it to support it, and patching the blow outs will have comparable costs and it will still be broken.