Inspectorjoe

In some states home inspections are required before a house can be sold, but in Colorado it's a risk far too many people are taking. Wow, that gets off to a great start. So now getting a home inspection is a risk that far too many people are taking. Wonderful. Christian Blochinger owns Blochinger Home Inspections and is a third generation home inspector who's gone over thousands of homes. Third generation home inspector? His website says the company was established in 1979. I'd love to see the chronology of that claim. And with so many foreclosures and short sales right now, that makes skipping an inspection that much riskier. ........ And with so many homes on the market, the potential for hidden problems goes up. Really? How so? So skipping a $200 to $500 inspection only to find out you bought a lemon leaves you with a money pit, by missing red flags like old, overloaded electrical systems. Someone who gets a $200 inspection has already bought a lemon. "With plumbing, old galvanized plumbing after 30 years is going to be corroded." Aside from the redundancy of starting that sentence with "with plumbing", that's nonsense. "A regular home inspection should take two hours to three hours," he said, "And they should be covering over 2,000 different items." I love how some inspectors tailor the time they say an inspection should take to the time that they spend. I can't remember the last time I spent less than 3 hours at an inspection - and I don't do on site reports. You should research inspectors online. Check their professional associations ask about the tools they use and how thorough they are. I wasn't surprised to see that Mr. Blochinger uses Nacho's Standards of Practice but has a link to the ASHI virtual home inspection. Surely that must raise a question in the minds of prospective (or maybe I should say perspective) home buyers? Ask how thorough they are. That's a good one! Yeah, I'm sure the answer to that will always be an honest one. "Also the biggest problem that people have in their houses is they don't ventilate it properly," he said as we examined an older model furnace unit, "So moisture comes up from underneath the house gets sucked into your furnace and winds up corroding the inside of your furnace." After thinking about it for a while now, I still can't think of a rejoinder to that one. To be fair, I don't know which comments are from the inspector and which are from the reporter. Many of the statements without quotes certainly seem like they would be coming from the inspector. One thing is for certain though - there's enough blame shame to go around.

I was about a half mile away from that when it happened. I was sitting in my van recovering from a too-long visit to a Chinese buffet. It was loud, even at that distance. "What the heck was that" was my thought. I didn't find out til this morning when I saw it on the news during breakfast. Those two guys had to be the luckiest people on Earth yesterday. The only thing left of that house appeared to be the floor joists. Amazing.

I came across similar discoloration today. It was on 10/3 non-metallic feeding the AC outside unit. The cable was attached to the basement wall with rubber lined clamps. The sheathing around every clamp was looked like it was burned. Image Insert: 60.2 KB I removed one and found the discoloration was actually lighter where the rubber had been in direct contact with the sheathing. Image Insert: 55.86 KB Could the rubber be out-gassing something that is interacting with the sheathing? I've always figured sheathing is pretty inert stuff. This raises more questions than answers.

Mike: If there was any doubt before, it's been erased - you are certifiably nuts.[] I'll bet that the results of that one incident ended up changing your life in ways you couldn't have known at the time. There's certainly worse penance than learning construction at an early age. Biil: Thanks for the post-1 am reply. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one on TIJ in the wee hours. Now that I think about it, I have seen those wire guards before, but it wasn't on anything I was inspecting. When I was growing up, in my neighborhood, Southside ..... er, I mean South Side Easton, PA, wood boards were commonly used as snow guards. There aren't too many of those left. Image Insert: 41.97 KB

Today, I had a 58 year old house with a slate roof that had strange wire snow guards. I wasn't sure that they were snow guards until I googled "wire snow guards". Around these parts, cast 'Sieger' snow guards rule. I didn't come up with much, other than to confirm that they were in fact snow guards, and that this type is intended to be distributed uniformly across the entire roof, instead of just one or two rows near the bottom. In this installation, there was only one row, as would be done with a cast snow guard installation. Also, they all seem to be bent down, but the bend is pretty much uniform among all of them. As they're installed on this house, it's pretty clear that they aren't going to be very effective, so I'm going to recommend that 'traditional' guards be installed. I was just curious if these wire guards are used in other parts of the country. I see a lot of slate, and this is a first for me. Image Insert: 121.51 KB Image Insert: 84.4 KB

I don't know of any EPA certification, but here in Pennsylvania, the DEP does certification. It's mandatory for testers and mitigaters. PA certification

The garage door opener is powered through an extension cord. Extension cords are not intended to be used as permanent wiring. You should have a qualified electrician install a receptacle at the opener.

Mike, offering an incentive for a referral and offering an incentive to write a favorable review on Angie's List are two entirely different things. The first one is a private offer between you and the buyer. The latter involves a third party - Angie's List. On the AL home page is a section titled Why use Angie's List? The first reason given is Unbiased ratings and reviews. By paying someone for writing a favorable review you ARE introducing a bias. The next reason is Companies don't pay to be on Angie's List. No matter how it's spun, you ARE paying to be on AL. Let's assume that every person who takes your incentive and writes a favorable review is 100% truthful in what they write. I think we can also assume that you're going to get more people writing favorable reviews than you would otherwise have. Isn't that going to skew the results? Wouldn't that be unfair to a consumer looking for a home inspector, because he would have no way of knowing that your number of favorable reviews has been artificially inflated above your competitors who don't pay for reviews? "A "bribe" is where you offer money to someone to do something that they normally wouldn't otherwise be inclined to do." Isn't that exactly intended purpose of your "incentive"? If they are already inclined to write a favorable review, why offer them cash to do it? Wouldn't a simple request be a sufficient prod? I'll be the first to admit, I'm a strange bird. While I agree that there's nothing unethical about offering referral fees and realize that they are common because they work, I personally find them distasteful. I've never taken advantage of one, and probably never will. I see it as prostituting myself. If I give a recommendation to a friend or relative, it's because I think it's in their best interest, not because I'm getting a kickback. I was kind of dismayed when ASHI started offering a referral fee a while back. I thought it was a pretty tawdry thing for a professional society to do. Like I said, I'm a strange bird.

Pay a client $25 to write a favorable review? That's not right. That's gaming the system. It could also backfire on you. Being the ornery curmudgeon that I am, if a service provider offered me such a "deal", I'd write a review all right, but I wouldn't take the $25. My review would detail how that provider in essence tried to bribe me to write favorable review. I think Angie's list is a great avenue for gaining new business. Why not be above board and simply ask the buyer to write a review, with no quid pro quo?

Count me as a member of that camp too, Eric. During the inspection, I tailor my words to what I feel is a level the buyer can understand . I don't do that with my reports. I try to take the time to choose words carefully, and to choose words that are precise. My report is the record of what I saw, what I did and what I recommended. I'm not going to dumb it down. If a reader doesn't understand a word, let him google it! Am I the only one who finds it incredibly ironic that Frank Luntz, the master of doublespeak, is advocating the use of small, simple words?

Yeah, there's nothing healthier than green vegetables. I had a bumper crop of jalapeño peppers this year. Grilled, they make for a particularly tasty 'healthy' snack. Since they burn rather easily, I protect them by stuffing them with sausage and cream cheese, then wrap them in bacon. Now that's healthy snackin'! Image Insert: 81.41 KB

2.7.2 Location © Gas meters shall be located at least 3 ft (0.9 m) from sources of ignition.

How did they dig those wells, Bill? Did they install wood shoring as they went down, then lay the stone from the bottom up? How did they get the stone down without killing the guy at the bottom? That had to be one of the most hellish, terrifying jobs to be had. In July, I had one on a back porch that was only covered by some boards. It had to be a good 40 feet deep. Image Insert: 127.57 KB

I was afraid you might ask that. The wood is still, uh, it's still curing in the garage. Can't have wood too dry, ya know! It's actually good that I procrastinated, because I came up with a much simpler design for the base (slab and wood slats) than I was going to do. First I have to trim my 15 foot high Leyland Cypress hedge, which I should have done this spring.

A forensic meteorologist can furnish that info: Accu Weather Forensic Weather Consultants Forensic Meteorology Associates Weatherworks Forensic Services

It's well past midnight and I'm still working on the reports from today's inspections. Well, actually, I've been surfing Youtube - which is why I'm still doing reports past midnight. I ran across a video demonstrating what must be a regional method of building demolition. I don't believe it's used too often here in the Northeast. Who says work can't be fun? Git 'er done! [utube] [/utube]

Thanks guys. I still can't figure out why the water didn't drain back through the pump during the upstroke. I guess it has a check valve built into it. That was a pretty cool house, with a beautifully preserved interior: Image Insert: 64.09 KB There were also some offbeat things, such as this powder room door: Image Insert: 58.96 KB Image Insert: 79.03 KB I inspected that house in 2001 and was looking forward to doing it again, but didn't get the chance, because the buyer fired me about two hours into it. I'm just ticked that he did it first, because I was about to do it to him. The guy pulled off baseboard trim in the basement when I wasn't there. He didn't want to hear that he couldn't do that. Later, when he pulled out his knife to probe some outside trim things escalated. Before we parted ways, he told me he didn't like my "confrontational attitude". Well, uh, yeah.

This pump is in the basement of a house built in 1850. The water from the pump goes up through iron pipe to a tee. One branch goes to a petcock over a drain. The other continues up the wall, through a stop valve, and across the ceiling, where it joins a heating pipe. The boiler is a 1960's Dynatherm, circulating hot water through radiators. The radiators on the first floor were exquisite, and probably dated back to 1880, if not earlier. Was this pump used to charge the heating system with water? Image Insert: 19.44 KB Image Insert: 19.24 KB Image Insert: 26.12 KB

Speed Bag Central

Dang! I knew I gave too many clues. Nice picture, too. My last memory of the bridge is quite a bit different than what the picture shows. I scanned a few slides that I took when they were finishing the cleanup. I put them on Flickr, so I'm not using up Michael & Rose's bandwidth with non inspection related pics. Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4

So it is a bait station. I kind of thought so, but it was odd having only one, at a relatively new house, in the middle of what used to be a field. Holy cow Bill, is there anything you can't identify - not to mention come up with a picture too? Here's another one. See if you can identify this structural member from my collection. I'll bet you have no trouble. It's from a Town lattice truss. The structure it came from had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was removed June 27, 1986. The piece became available for my acquisition on a sad January night in 1985. Image Insert: 67.27 KB Image Insert: 69.86 KB Image Insert: 56.67 KB

Since I didn't know what it was, I sure as heck wasn't going to try to pull it out of the ground.

I'm not sure where to post this, so I put it here since I saw it at the exterior. What is this? I did a Google image search for bait boxes and came up with things that looked kind of similar, but not really all that close. There was only one, located at a corner, a few inches from the foundation. The house was an 8 year old ranch. Image Insert: 141.04 KB Image Insert: 197.45 KB

Get a hobby? Urinals ARE my hobby.

The Sloan 180-SMO is powered by four C batteries. The rated battery life is 72,000 flushes. That's amazing. Joe