Do You Know The Six Ps?

Many years ago in another life I worked with a man, my foreman, who I admired very much. He was very talented with his hands and things mechanical. He taught me about the Six Ps;

Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Elegantly simple, think before you do, and think some more.

A good deal of what I find wrong as a Connecticut home inspector can be said to be caused by not following the Six Ps. Another part of building deficiencies that I find can be traced to a lack of skill and understanding of how stuff functions. Which I believe has a fairly direct correlation to not thinking things through or just not giving a crap.

Take for example this patio.

Looking at it you may notice it is level with the entry door. It is also level with the rest of this addition extending to the right. The addition is the kitchen of this small antique home. The kitchen at one time must have been a good portion of the first floor. There wouldn't have been much room for cooking, eating and gathering, so it's understandable that some one decided to add the addition.

At another point the homeowners must've decided to add the patio. It may have been done with the addition or later, there is no way for me to know, but it was put in as you see it.

Putting a concrete structure or any structure against the house most be done with great fore thought (sounding familiar?). Patios, porches or decks can and do bring water to the house. These structures need to be pitched to persuade the water to travel away from the home, but you can not rely on pitch alone. Flashings are a necessary defense against wayward water. Too often I find them absent or poorly installed.

Getting back to this patio, when I examined it from the exterior I noted there was little pitch to the surface. When I went down into the crawl space and looked at the wall where the patio sits, here is what I found. The box plate of the addition decayed through. That tan material is soil, not the patio, but soil. The patio is above this point. The sill plate which sits directly on the foundation about where that pink mess of insulation is in the picture, was in worse condition.

This is a very serious problem and is going to cost the homeowners a lot of money to fix. And why did this happen? All because someone didn't think things through and follow the Six Ps.

This brings us to the seventh P;

Pissed!

No further explanation is needed.

James Quarello
2010 SNEC-ASHI President
NRSB #8SS0022
JRV Home Inspection Services, LLC

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