In the past few weeks I've written about a new homeowner that didn't have an inspection when he bought the house. He finished off his 3rd floor roughed-in bath six months after he moved in and to his dismay he found out the waste was not connected and he'd been flushing that new baths toilet beneath his house.
The second homeowner did have a home inspection and was able to avert a potential disaster when it was found that the HVAC installers put his furnace documentation on top of the gas burners in the furnace cabinet.
This week we'll learn about a third new home buyer that was able to save himself a lot of aggravation (and heating $$$) by having his new home inspected.
Horror Story #3
I was inspecting a brand new home in the middle of January a few years back. It was cold for our area (20's during the day) then. The home was big, about 3700sf and the buyer spent a bunch on upgrades. The inspection was going pretty well for the most part with not really much to report. I go into the crawl space last on my inspections since they're the most fun (ha ha ha!). I opened the crawl space hatch and looked in and knew that something wasn't right. It took me a second but then I realized that there was no insulation installed underneath the house! This is an item that the county code inspector is supposed to sign off on. OOOPPPPSSSS! It just so happens the builder's site foreman was next door so we (me and the homeowner) called him over. I opened the crawl space and asked him what did he see. He looks, shrugs his shoulders, looks again, and then asks "OK, you got me. What's wrong?". We told him, he cursed and was on his cell phone getting insulation ordered. Even better, the county code inspector was a couple doors down doing a final on another house. The foreman called him over and asked him to look underneath. To his (the code inspector) credit he saw the problem right away. Moral of this story...don't rely on code inspectors to check everything they're supposed to check before you move in!
Missing or incomplete insulation is fairly common in new construction. Several times I've found unopened bags of insulation beneath sections of homes. Guess its quitting time, the guys installing leave and never come back to finish the job. In the meantime, the homeowners that don't have inspections wonder why the floor in one room always feels cold in the winter.
Urge new home buyers to have that new home inspected. It's cheap insurance!
Mike Eugene
Pillar to Post of Central Virginia
804-370-5092
Comments(1)