When a home has a crawl space with vents, often we will find that those vents are blocked by earth, leaves or organic matter. They are at grade and, in many instances, the homeowner needs to put in wells at the vents. These can be pre-purchased in plastic or metal. Sometimes people make them of
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03/30/2010
I have the day off today -- yippy -- and I am going to relax a bit. The weather is not so appealing in anyone's book. It is damp, windy and chilly. However, I think that I am going to head over to Fairhaven (south Bellingham) and do some tramping around today. In a vision of things to come, nice
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03/28/2010
I have, below, a sample of a test question that relates to home inspector laws in Washington state. See if you can get the answer correct, then I will have some explanatory comments below. In Washington state, an inspector may NOT disclose information, without permission, to any party other than
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03/28/2010
We home inspectors are processing a huge amount of information as we pass through a house. Distractions can lead to the inspector forgetting something or making a mistake. While most inspectors use a checklist of some type, part of the job is intuitive and there is lots of data to record and any
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03/27/2010
Home inspection standards of practice do not usually call for such inspections, but most inspectors take a look at some of the appliances. One of the first things that I look at, at the refrigerator/freezer, is the gasket on the refrigerator door. The photo below is a condition that I see, often
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03/27/2010
The fallacy is that pressure treated wood will last almost forever. The truth is that it can rot quite quickly. The post shown here is pressure-treated. It has been in the ground roughly ten years. It is not an anomaly, many of the other posts on this same fence were rotted away. Sometimes this
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03/26/2010
The buzz in the local news lately is that those of us in Bellingham should see a modest increase in the prices of homes in the coming months. That applies to several Washington cities and the prognostication is from CNNMoney.com. CNN predicts that Bellingham, listed in their top 25 communities
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03/26/2010
I cannot tell you how often, in the course of home inspections at King of the House, I find all of the various types of air-handling ducts that are loose. These might be the newer flex ducts from furnaces or exhaust fans, or it might even be metal ducting. When it is a dryer duct, that loose duc
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03/25/2010
Tonight I was finishing up an inspection report, which gave me a number of photos that I can use for future posts. While the photos are handy on my desktop, I was going to send them up to Active Rain and leave them in the draft mode. I love doing that because then, when I have time, I can go put
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03/24/2010
In older homes it is common to find sockets with bare light bulbs in the clothes closets. Many years back nobody though much about this. However, over the years, there have been some serious fires the result of incandescent bulbs coming in contact with storage, such as fabrics. These combustible
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03/21/2010