When is the right time to get a home inspection? Part 3
We’re back with Part 3 of our topic of “When to get a home inspection”. This one focuses on when you should get a home inspection as a homeowner who is not looking to sell their house. Now, you may have noticed the gap in the posting of the last blog post to this one. The answer for the delay is quite simple, life just got away from us. Which is exactly when it could be the right time to get a home inspection as a homeowner. We recommend every 5-7 years for a Home Health Inspection. There are times we’d recommend before this mark too, but it’s a good rule of thumb.
With an inspection, we’re going to test as much as we can for you and visually inspect your whole house and lot, all piping and HVAC we can see. We’ll look at the conditions of materials inside and out to give you our professional read out of how the house is for functionality and safety as it stands. Your heating system and water heater’s age; these dates won’t change unless you change out the units, but the inspection will remind you of their age and prepare you for when their time is nearing to start thinking about their expected lifespan. You get your car inspected yearly, I know it’s a government regulation for emissions, but quite frankly, I’ve never had a technician not come back and make a comment on the status of the brakes or note if they see anything else concerning. In the majority of situations, you’ve spent a heck of a lot more on your house than your car, and this might surprise you, but most people are reactive in terms of home maintenance as opposed to proactive.
There are times when you’re just running through life and things just get so busy or overwhelming that you go into autopilot. Maybe it's an especially rough or hectic week at home with kids or at work in the office, or maybe you just hit a slump. There comes a time when most people just go into an autopilot mode and just don’t pay as close of attention to things as they normally would. Even noticing things but not registering what they mean. After a while these little things that are noticed, or in many cases un-noticed, sneak up on you and become issues. They become items that impact your day-to-day, but you just talk about them with frustration as opposed to any solution. Sometimes it takes another set of eyes or another voice that is not you, to get you to register that these small things can lead to bigger issues if you don’t take care of them.
We performed a home health inspection for a client recently, and when we arrived, we spoke to the homeowner as normal and explained our process. We gave a reminder of what was being inspected, the limitations of our visual inspection, etc…essentially our standard rehash of everything our contract says. The client in this case replied in jest, “So you’re going to tell me everything I already know?”
During the inspection, we found 3 newer, larger foundation cracks, leaking water lines and some settlement issues that he had “known” about but didn’t put together how they were impacting the property. This client leads an active life. They “knew” things were happening with the house, but they just were not focused on those things with everything else. While they knew there were some problems, like a new depression in the ground forming near a portion of the home, they didn’t check to see how it was impacting the inside of the home. Those cracks were directly in the area where the settlement had occurred.
In another case, one side of the house was not really accessed a lot on the property. The front and side doors were towards the right of the house and the left side of the house had mainly brush and not a lot of yard space. As such, the owner didn’t spend a lot of time on the left side of the house. If you’re entering and leaving the home only, you’re pretty much just seeing the front and right side of the home only. Well, when we did the inspection and looked at the left side of the house, that is where we found the majority of the exterior issues. It was out of sight and possibly out of mind because of that. From the clients view, they were seeing their curb appeal of the house when they arrived home. When we look at the whole house and property, we’re looking well beyond how you normally look at your house. In this case, we were able to spot that even though the right side of the dormers looked fine and in great condition, the left side of both dormers had significant moss build up on the roofline where they connected. It looked like they had tried to start a meadow on their roof.
Now, the above stories are actually part of the reason we tend to not post pictures and videos from our inspections. Another part being the client paid us for those pictures and information. It doesn’t feel right to be posting that on social media as marketing when we can just get the point across while not showing their home to the world. But the other reason is a psychological one that we’ve noticed with homeowners. You shouldn’t feel overwhelmed, you shouldn’t feel bad and you shouldn’t feel embarrassed that your home is not perfect and maintenance is needed. That may sound silly to some people, but knowing your home needs maintenance can lead to anxiety about how you’re going to do it and how things got this way when you thought you were taking care of your biggest investment.
We don’t want any of our clients or anyone else's clients to ever feel overwhelmed or embarrassed about the state of their home. It pains us to hear stories that include the phrases, “the inspector said it’s the worst house they’ve ever seen” or “it’s so embarrassing that I’ve let it get to this state.” Houses simply are. There is not a good or bad with them, they simply just are. Like everything else in the universe, they are impacted by entropy. They need maintenance. They need repairs, and systems in them do eventually need replacement. That being said, repairs and maintenance can be done in improper ways that make things unsafe, so it’s best to always confer with a licensed and qualified professional for what you’re looking to do. If we find anything on your home health inspection, you can be sure we’ll tell you exactly who to follow up with.