Honey, I Finished The Internet – small dead animals

13 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

When I saw the sub title, I thought it was going to be aboot how useless most home inspectors are.
Surprised they caught any of those problems.

Checkout Penhorwood condos, Ft. Mac….

One piece of advice -always choose your own home inspector after getting independent recommendations. If you rely on sales people to recommend them you chance having someone who doesn’t put your intrests first . As someone with more than 40 years in building I have often had people ask me to look at homes they wished to purchase . I am happy to do so and I do not charge them. Even where to me there are obvious problems , I find sales people are not appreciative. I do not believe I am unduly critical and consider the age and practices of the time period of the home. And after that I strongly recommend they have the home inspected by a reputable qualified home inspector . A good one is money well spent.

The first home we wanted to buy in town looked very good, but we’re not home inspection experts. It’s a good thing we hired someone who was as he saved us for being on the hook for shoddy and illegal upgrades to what turned out to be an unsafe home. We couldn’t tell.
Hire an inspector, folks!

#6 is actually quite creative, and in an emergency would work very well until the correct repair was done.
It is not a permanent solution obviously.

When I was looking for a house last year, the first one I was interested in was great until the Inspector discovered that all the pipes in the basement had been rigged to explode when the water was turned on. The previous tenant when he/she moved rigged all the pipes to fall apart as soon as the water was turned on.

Have a client who moved to a new premises, which had renovated to specs and – we thought – inspected. Someone happened to look into the “attic” space and realized the platform on which the hot water tank was seated was seriously bowed (was plywood). First response from contractor was “it’s passed inspection” but that changed when client said “good, if it fails, you’re responsible”. Plumber now back in and organizing reinforcing of platform. We rather suspect was platform left over from previous tenant, but larger hot water tank installed which has caused the problem.
That being said, were present when daughter and husband had an inspector check out the house they wanted to buy. This man was seriously anal, but they now have a book on all possible problems. They bought anyway; are finding out the quirks of buying an older home (though they love the neighbourhood and the home generally) – interesting that some of their current concerns weren’t found by the inspector.

I had to do a double-take on #5, then my eyes got wide…
That’s a big 3-phase switch, handling (as a guess) 480 Volts and at least 600 Amps. Were something to go wrong inside that box, it would be quite spectacular, as well as extremely dangerous for anyone nearby.

We found a fried rat at my work a few months ago, latch had rusted off a pump control box leaving it open a crack. The rat managed to build a nest before getting crispified.

The fried rat is instructive.
Once upon a time I witnessed a crow crossing two wires on a main power line. It knocked out a whole hospital, because the charcoal remains of the crow formed a very durable short circuit. To the point where molten metal was dripping onto the grass. The power company had to replace everything on top of that pole.
Be sure to keep those panels covered. Rodents really can get in anywhere.
Also, when buying an older house, be sure to examine the floor joists very carefully. The number of times I’ve seen “repairs” or “renovations” where some BONEHEAD took a sawzall to joists so he could fit a duct or a pipe, it makes me despair for the human race.
My personal favorite is when people omit blocking from floor joists. There is a house in my town that I looked at one time, there is -no- blocking in the first floor joists. Every board goes from the “foundation” (I use the term loosely) to a “beam” down the middle, a couple of 2x8s held up by a series of jack tubes. Every joist is leaning because there’s no blocking. They didn’t put any in when they built it. The beam sags considerably between jacks, a distance of about six feet. The person who lives in it weighs close to 300lbs, I could see which room they were standing in upstairs by the bow in the floor. It moved with them.
With all that, the house is quite old. WWI vintage. All these years and it never fell down. The God of drunk men and little children must be smiling down on it. The continued existence of such a code violation does however shake my faith in the building inspection department of the county. Either no building or fire inspector has ever been inside, or they were blind, deaf and not too bright, or shenanigans.

At our last home purchase, I accompanied the inspector on his rounds. We went on the roof, into the attic, under the floor, into every room, closet, etc. You get it. Everywhere. He said I was the first prospective buyer to ever go with him on his inspection.

When we bought our 75 year old house (2 additions done in the 60’s) 6 years ago, I followed the inspector throughout the whole process. I had already done my own inspection on the home since I was purchasing this rental property privately from friends, but the bank needed a “qualified” inspection report. The funny thing is I really wanted this home despite some of the major issues. This house was cheap and a good amount of sweat equity could make it worth much more and/or be our retirement home. Fortunately for us the inspector didn’t recognize the problems that I did and we got our loan.
An old house with issues shouldn’t be too surprising, but the amount of issues and design flaws I have seen on brand new homes is disturbing. The cost of these new homes is the real travesty.

I’ve bought several houses, and worked in the construction industry for 27 years, hands on.
Depending on what you do for a living,( if you’re a carpenter or other building tradesman you probably know more than 90% of inspectors) it’s a good idea to hire a home inspector, but try to find one who’s a retired carpenter or house builder,again, hands on, not a salesman who just orders up tradesmen. A fellow I knew was a journeyman carpenter, went into building, excellent guy, never missed anything, took half the day to inspect a home,a bit more expensive and well worth it.
Then there are the guys who were suddenly unemployed and couldn’t find a job,so they went and took one of those home inspector’s courses. I followed a few of them around when my wife,a realtor at that time, had clients who hired a home inspector. The things they missed were quite amazing. They are usually quite fast in their appraisal, because they don’t know what in hell they are doing.
Some of them knew the Building Code fairly well, but that was about the extent of their expertise.
There is in B.C., persons of a certain ethnicity who are notorious (with a capital”N”) for building shi* quality houses,but they get the contracts to build some of the biggest homes on the Lower Mainland,mainly due to the racist business policy of their fellow ethnics.
If you are about to buy a house one of this group built, assume that everything was done wrong and the bigger the house,the worse the problems.If the house is on a slope, you need an engineer,as sure as death the foundation is not built properly.
Everything else, from basement to rooftop needs to be closely inspected by qualified tradesmen and building inspectors,as you’ll find every code violation in the book and then some.
If you are a Liberal,though, no inspection of houses built by these ethnics is needed as that would be racist. So move right in and enjoy frolicking in the basement swimming pool you didn’t know the place had.

13 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

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