Listen to your body talk.      If you don't know my story, I had a heart attack in December of 2012. Pretty serious and was actually shocked twice in the ER before getting a single stent put in my heart. Everything has been good since then.     When your body is trying to tell you something and you just ignore it, bad things usually happen. Last Monday 4/14/22 I woke up in the middle of the night with a soaking wet t-shirt. Too many blankets? My wife was sleeping too close? Not sure. Tuesday I went to an inspection and had a fevery face. At this point I think I have Covid. Took a Covid test and it was negative. Went to southern Illinois for the weekend to attend a funeral for my wife's brother in Missouri. Spent the night at our son's house. Had sweats again on Friday night. Then on Sat... 03/25/2022

Happy and safe Thanksgiving to all. Click above for our special message.Scott Seaton-The Home Inspector With A Heart  SLS Home Inspections @815-644-6271 Inspecting homes like yours in the Kankakee, Will, Iroquois counties Illinois area since 2007. Real Estate inspections with same day report delivery.  Mold and air quality testing.  FREE 90 day Homeowners Warranty. Included with every inspection. FREE Sewergard protection for the first 90 days. covers up to $4000 of sewer or water main repairs. FREE Recallchek appliance recall service. Included with every inspection. FREE Moldsafe coverage on every inspection. FREE Platinum Roof Protection Plan with 5 year leak repair coverage. FREE $100,000 One Year NXT Structural warranty 18 month warranty available with every inspection Visit my webs... 11/25/2021

     The annual Bourbonnais Township Scarecrow festival is always a huge success.      Starting the first week of October, local businesses, charities or individuals can enter the contest for a chance to win prizes and promote their businesses or group.      The contest winners are determined by the appointed judges and also by the coveted peoples choice voters. The transformation from a simple plastic fence on Kennedy Drive into a 2 block display of Halloween fall displays and scarecrows is almost overnight. Lots of hard work and creative designs are displayed that must have taken weeks to work on just to be ready for the big set up. Take a nice walk with your family past all the entries and cast your votes for your favorite. You can even pose in some of the displays for pictures. It's... 10/28/2021

     We have two Frank Lloyd Wright homes in our town. Kankakee, Il.      Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) is famous the world over and his homes are known for some of the coolest, most innovative and striking design ideas ever built. Kankakee, IL is proud to have two Wright homes. Next door to each other too. One of them is privately owned and there are not a whole lot of people that have visited that home as long as I can remember. But the B. Harley Bradley home is a very different story. It's long history has several inspiring chapters, several chapters of struggles and near demise, and one single chapter of extreme sadness. The Bradley house is the very first home that FLW designed with his new Prairie Style design concept. Located on the banks of the Kankakee River (the cleanest river in t... 10/28/2021

Things I wish I knew- As I have gotten older, I realize there are so many things I just don't know anything about. I wish I did, but either I never took the time or didn't realize I really wanted to know about that skill or idea or information to learn about it. For instance, I have always wanted to play guitar, I even own an acoustic giutar, but have never picked it up to play one note. I would like to know how to play golf, but learning to play is just a reason to be able to hang out with my kids or brothers more often. I am a decent athlete, so I'm sure if I played enough, I would be pretty good. Some players are just so serious and I just want to learn to be able to relax and enjoy a good day outside. No pressure.     So when the pandemic became a real crisis and Zoom calls became t... 09/26/2021

Fresher than Fresh, sounds great doesn't it? Well, it is great and here's the story. I sold lumber and building materials for 32 years. I would often go the local library in the town near the lumber yard where I worked so I could do blueprint takeoffs for the house lumber package I was selling. It was quiet, no interruptions from the lumber yard guys, had a bathroom and pay phone, (there were no cell phones yet), and a big giant table I could spread out my blueprints. It was perfect. One day as I was wrapping up the takeoff, I saw a Consumer's Union magazine on the table next to mine. One of the stories was about ranking store salsa in a jar. I loved salsa, as it was becoming a really great alternative to ketchup. I grabbed the magazine, read the story about the different salsas, and de... 07/16/2021

What might have been different about this picture...     This will always be a very emotional picture for me and all of my family. It was taken on Christmas Day in 2012. That means it was exactly 13 days after I came home from the hospital after a heart attack. On December 10, 2012, at 1:30 in the moring, I woke up to intense pain and crushing pressure in my chest. I was covered in sweat and immediately knew I was having a heart attack. I woke my wife, told her to call 9-1-1. I put some jeans on and went downstairs. The Bourbonnais Fire Dept ambulance arrived within 3 minutes and before I knew it, I was in the Riverside Medical Center emergency room getting hooked up to several monitors. Exactly 15 minutes after calling the ambulance, my heart went into ventricular tachycardia, or V-tac... 05/30/2021

Perry Farm is a winning visit for the family.Bourbonnais Illinois is the home of the Perry Farm. Today it is listed by the National Park Service of the Dept of the Interior in the National Register of Historic Places. But it wasn't always like that.      In 1835, Thomas Durham moved his wife and family of five daughters and four sons to Bourbonnais Grove,IL, about 60 miles south of Chicago on property on the banks of the Kankakee River. He built a farmhouse and a three bay English barn and a horse barn. Legend is the farmhouse cellar was part of the Underground Railroad. Thomas died in 1854 and left the farm to his sons. He generously left his daughters $5 each. The sons were not successful farmers and by 1866 had fallen on hard times financially and were looking to sell the farm. One s... 04/09/2021

See if you can guess which one of these things are fake. 1. Buyer shows up wearing bright blue, yellow, red, orange and purple fingernail polish. 2. Buyer has on a woman's diamond engagement ring on his ring finger. 3. A friend shows up and proceeds to pull a box of cards and dice and a clear plastic tube with 2 felt placemats out of his coat. The 2 of them play a game of Magic the Gathering on the kitchen island countertop. 4. The sewer line drains just fine and no water starts bubbling up into the basement through the floor drain. All ductwork is in great shape with no remnants of friable asbestos. The main beam in just fine, noone has chain sawed it nearly all the way through. The chimney brick is not falling off the chimney into the front yard. Good guessing. From the files of now I... 03/07/2021

It's not Hard to Like Agents Like This. I am a home inspector, with two inspectors on our team. While not the largest inspection company in Illinois, we are pretty big in our small part of the world. We complete approximately 600 inspections each year, and have been steadily growing for every one of the 13 years in business. In this time, I have been able to work with literally hundreds of real estate agents. I have seen first hand the various ways of selling methods employed by these agents. Again, I'm not an agent, but I have been in sales for all my adult life, having sold lumber and building materials for over 30 years. I know what excellent and also what poor customer service looks like. Excellent service agents have always made it a point to attend the inspection. They always are ... 02/07/2021

Odd, It was easy to be thankful this year.       I know it sounds crazy but there are so many things to be thankful for as this trying, agonizing, maddening, frustrating, sad, painful, distressing year comes to close.  But as for business and the steady background of the corona virus, the business success far outpaced the virus. We are thankful for so many things, but our list would not be complete without these handful of events. 1. The PPP loan. Somehow we were able to take advantage of the PPP loan and get a much needed assist when the virus stay at home/lockdowns happened. Illinois deemed real estate essential and we kept working through the lockdown but there were some really slow weeks when I was seriously worried we were in trouble if it stayed slow. We kept marketing to our age... 11/26/2020

I think I'm the same person.   When the news of this pandemic started getting serious, I was already thinking about how my business and personal life may change. There has to be a silver lining in the madness that may happen, I was sure of it. Not to get political, but I was pretty sure if the millions of people that subscribe to conspiracy theories, I knew the country was in deep doo doo. That has proven to be happening all across the country. I told my family that we were going to be taking this very seriously. I told my employees we were going to be taking it very seriously. I feel there will be a point in time when we will not have to wear a mask in public, but it will be a long time coming.  My feeling on the issue of wearing a mask is how I have come to realize that many people t... 06/30/2020

We Just Might be Telling You Something Important.  Really, if there was no benefit to the inspection agreement that the State of Illinois requires us to have signed before we start the inspection, then I would gladly toss it out right now. But it does have lots of valuable information that protects the buyer as well as the inspector. We always make sure and go over the agreement with the buyers at the end of the inspection so they have a clear understanding of what they signed, even though this is not required by our SOP. We just feel it's makes them more comfortable, but the real reason is that it manages expectations about the inspection.  At a recent inspection, the buyer came at the end, due to the corona virus and as we requested. He walking in angry, would not wait for the second... 05/24/2020

The Great Kankakee River-Gotta Love It.       I have lived in the Kankakee River Valley for over 50 years. Kankakee,IL is the county capitol for Kankakee County. Kankakee was an Indian name for the local tribes. The French fur traders discovered the great land surrounding the Kankakee River in the 1800's. I have spent time in numerous states around the country camping with BoyScouts. I was a Scoutmaster for over 9 years and a member of the local Troop 324 for nearly 20 years. I have taken pontoon rides, speedboat trips and rafting trips. But nothing compares to taking a trip down a river in a canoe, and I have logged hundreds of miles in my canoe on the Kankakee River. There are many rivers in Illinois and all throughout the midwest. Many of them are dirty, trash filled, with speed boa... 03/31/2020

What are we doing to stay safe? Our priority at this time is the safety of our inspection team, their families, their relatives, their neighbors, their friends, our clients, our realtor partners, and all of their families, friends, neighbors, relatives.  Basically, everyone that could possible be infected with the COVID-19 virus. With that in mind, we have instituted these rules for all inspections until we pass through this crisis.We are requesting that only one person attend for the buyers, and best case is no one attends the inspection. We will call them in the evening after the report is sent to go over any questions they may have. If the house is occupied, we request no sellers be present. No hand shakes upon greeting, we will be wearing gloves throughout the inspection as well as ... 03/20/2020

Time can be your best friend, or NOT.      Several years ago I wrote this blog post (https://activerain.com/blogsview/4620028/think-of-all-the-things-i-can-get-done-now-) about time being spent on things that weren't helping my business move forward. There were numerous time wasters that I would catch myself doing from time to time, and even sometimes knowing I had other things to do, would still waste a few minutes here and there going back to the time wasters. I suppose just knowing there is an issue with wasting time is the first step. "Hello, my name is Scott and I'm a time waster." I should have added, part-time time waster, because it's not all the time, just once in a while, but it still bugs me that I catch myself doing it at all.      I chose this post because I am a firm belie... 02/24/2020

I will watch the Super Bowl, because I'm an American citizen but I'm a Packers fan and that was brutally bad to watch the 49'ers game. However, I'll take a 14-4 season and getting the championship game every year. Better than being a bottom feeder. This is a super easy recipe and has actually won a dessert contest before. Here's my recipe. Apple turnovers.Heat oven to 3752 Granny smith apples, cut into 8 slices. 2 tubes crescent rolls.2 sticks of butter melted.1 1/2 cups of sugar mixed with melted butter. 1 TSP vanilla, mixed with butter and sugar.1 can Mountain dew. Cinnamon to tasteGrease a 9x13 pan. Roll the apples up in rolls. Place in pan.Pour butter sugar mix all over the top. Here's the secret. Pour Mountain dew all inside the pan, slowly. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Bake for 35-45 m... 01/29/2020

I've said it before...Water always wins and is not your friend inside your home. This sump pump discharge jumped out at me the minute I saw it at my Bourbonnais Illinois Home inspection. Matted down grass. Moss growing on the wall. Large opening where the pipe exits the wall. It took every ounce of willpower to not run inside the house and look at the interior wall, joists and plywood. The house next door had an elbow directing the water down into the drain pipe away from the house. This house was a bit different. When the pump turned on, the water was moving with such force and volume that most splashed outside the drain pipe on the ground. Some was splashed back into the pipe opening into the wall cavity. And of course some also went down the pipe where it is supposed to go.    All t... 12/29/2019

  Thanks to Barb Todaro's post today, I thought I would ask the AR group what your thoughts are on this comparison sheet between my company and my competition. This will be available for agents to hand to their clients when they start their search for an inspection company.      The typical practice is for the buyer agent (BA) to always give the client 3 names of inspectors to choose from. The logic is that if something goes wrong with the inspection, the BA liability will be reduced because the BA gave them 3 names, and it was the clients decision who they hired. In reality, using an inspection company that does not offer all the FREE warranties that we include, the client will be in a position of higher liability if  a qualified system breaks down after they close, and the first pers... 12/15/2019

Test burn for the fire department?      One of the first inspections I ever did was about 10 years ago. A woman in a very small town south of my home called to tell me the village wanted to condemn her home she was trying to sell. It was vacant but she had a potential buyer, and he would be there to walk around during the inspection with me. She wanted to prove to the village the home should not be condemned.      The first thing I noticed when I pulled up to the house was there were no steps to the front door, but there was obvious signs of a what used to be a full size front porch. When I asked her about it, she stated that the porch was so badly eaten by termites that it fell off the house and crashed into the front yard.      She paid me, left, and the buyer and I went about the in... 12/02/2019