What this is for
Three different jobs, one sheet:
Buyer, before an offer. You are not inspecting. You are deciding whether this house is worth several hundred dollars to have inspected properly — and that decision is worth making well, because most people looking at four houses cannot afford to inspect all four.
Walking round with the inspector. The most valuable hour in the whole purchase, and the one people most often skip because they are at work.
Seller, preparing. Everything the inspector writes becomes a negotiating point. Most of what they will write is an afternoon’s work.
The four numbers to ask for first
Before anything else, ask the age of:
The roof
The furnace or boiler
The air conditioner
The water heater
Those four numbers tell you more about the next five years of cost than anything else you can learn in an hour. A house where all four are near the end is not a bad house — it is a house with fifteen to twenty-five thousand dollars of scheduled expenditure, and that belongs in the price.
Add twelve months of utility bills and an insurance quote, and you know more than most buyers know at closing.
Water, and where it goes
Most of what goes badly wrong in a house is water that was allowed to sit against it or get into it. Two observations, from the ground, cover most of the risk:
Which way does the ground slope at each wall? It should fall away — roughly six inches over the first ten feet. Ground sloping toward the house is the root cause of a large proportion of everything else on this list.
Where do the downspouts discharge? Four to six feet out, onto something that carries it further. Discharging at the foundation is the single most common defect on an American house and one of the cheapest to fix.
Then, inside: every ceiling under a bathroom, the base of every basement wall, and under every sink while the tap runs.
Foundation cracks, and which ones matter
| What you see | Usually means |
|---|---|
| Fine vertical cracks | Shrinkage. Extremely common, rarely structural. |
| Horizontal cracks | Lateral pressure on the wall. A question for an engineer. |
| Stair-stepped cracks in block | Movement. Engineer. |
| Wider than a quarter-inch | Engineer, whatever its direction. |
| One side displaced from the other | Engineer, urgently. |
| Diagonal cracks from a door corner | The opening has moved, which is a structural symptom |
Photograph everything with a coin or a tape for scale. The width matters less than whether it is wider next year, and a dated photograph is the only way to know.
What an inspection does not cover
This surprises people, and it is where the real risk sits. A standard inspection is visual and non-invasive. It excludes, essentially everywhere:
- Anything not accessible, and anything requiring dismantling
- The inside of the sewer lateral
- Radon, mould, asbestos, lead
- Pests and termites
- Wells, septic systems and pools
- The chimney flue above the firebox
Several of those are available separately and are worth buying. In particular:
A sewer scope on anything built before roughly 2005. A couple of hundred dollars against a five-figure trench across your garden is the best risk-adjusted spend in the whole process.
A radon test, which is cheap, and whose remediation is a known and manageable number.
A separate septic inspection, which is not what the home inspector does.
Attend, and ask four questions
The report is written to limit the inspector’s liability. It will list forty items without ranking them. The walk-through is where the ranking lives, and these four questions produce it:
- What worries you most about this house?
- What could you not get to, and what does that mean?
- Which of these are safety, which are major, and which are cosmetic?
- Roughly what would each of them cost?
An inspector who has spent three hours in a house has opinions. They will rarely volunteer them and will almost always answer if asked.
Split what you find three ways before you negotiate. Safety items, major systems, cosmetic. Asking for everything on a forty-item report tends to get you nothing; asking for the four things in the first two categories tends to work.