Podcast: Season 4 Episode 10 – Secure and Sound: Home Safety Features Every House Should Have

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Season 4, EP. 10 – Podcast Transcript: Secure and Sound: Home Safety Features Every House Should Have

 

NOTE: This transcript was automatically processed using artificial intelligence and may or may not be 100% accurate.

 

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) [Brian] Welcome to the House Fluent Inspections Podcast, where we hope you enjoy stress-free home buying, home selling, and home ownership. I’m Brian, and I’m Tony, and we are both licensed professional inspectors here in the state of Texas, where we want to help relieve some of the anxiety by arming you with information about your home. How was your week so far? [Tony] I mean, it’s going good. Busy enough to keep busy, but here I am doing a podcast, so I’ve got a little bit of extra time. [Brian] It’s podcast day. [Tony] Yeah. Oh, that’s funny. So what are we talking about today, Tony? So today I thought we would talk about home safety features that every house should have. Do you prioritize home safety to protect yourself and your family? [Brian] I would say my wife prioritizes it more than I do, probably. But yeah, I mean, of course, you want your house to be safe. [Tony] According to staysafe.org, the top 10 most common hazards in a home are, like number 10 would be suffocation. Could you guess? Suffocation. [Brian] So you’d be wrapping the house pretty tight to suffocate. I mean, you know, that’s got to be suffocating. [Tony] No, I get it. Yeah. [Brian] So they’re talking about probably little kids with plastic bags. [Tony] Actually, yes, I would think so. But what would you guess would be some, from a home inspection perspective, and something that we would see, what would you think are good ones from the top 10? Could you guess? [Brian] Top 10 hazards in a home? Correct. Common hazards. Common hazards. I would think number one would be stupidity. [Tony] Well, that’s maybe, that’s probably, yeah, a root cause of a lot of things. But yeah, no, there’s certain… [Brian] Well, I thought I’d just go ahead and turn that screw there. [Tony] It’s been bugging me. Yeah. No, no, there’s, I mean, pretty common things that, you know, you would think of like falls, fire hazards. [Brian] Yep. For sure. [Tony] Those are a lot of things that we run into. [Brian] Carbon monoxide. [Tony] Carbon monoxide, maybe drowning. Yeah. Swimming pools. Yep. Absolutely. [Brian] Swimming pools. What about gas? Things like, you know, gas stoves, gas fireplaces. Those are definite hazards in a home. [Tony] Now, here’s one I see on here, which seems kind of odd. Dishwashers. What? I mean, if it’s not securely attached… [Brian] Well, you’ve never, you never crawled in one and turned it on. Right? No. That would be tough. That’s how we do showers in my house. [Tony] Hey, remove those racks. I’m going to get inside there and see if I can. [Brian] Yeah. That’s how we do showers in my house. We just throw the kids in there and turn the dishwasher. [Tony] Yeah, you can probably fit two or three of them in there if they’re small enough, right? That’s right. But let’s talk about some of these others. [Brian] So, yeah. So, let’s go down the list real quick. So, what, 10 was suffocation, 9 dishwashers, 8 stoves, 7 was sharp objects. So, I guess scissors, knives, that kind of thing. [Tony] Yeah. I mean, I think that’s more along the lines of something that’s inside the house, but not a part or component of the house. [Brian] Sure. Yeah. Right. Choking. So, I guess don’t anger your neighbor. [Tony] Right. So, we’re going back down the list. [Brian] We got drowning, 4 is fire hazards, 3 carbon monoxide, 2 is poisoning. Don’t anger your wife. [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] And number 1 is falls. So, you’re probably caught. Yeah. Yeah. So, some of these do make it to our inspection report for sure. [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] So, where do you want to start? [Tony] Well, we can start with number 1, falls. [Brian] Yeah. So, we call those tripping hazards usually. [Tony] Or possibly a child working his way through improperly spaced ballards on a staircase. [Brian] Yeah. [Tony] That’s true. Or a balcony. [Brian] So, I have a story for you about that actually. Okay. So, there was a man in Connecticut who was helping his friend move into a new house. You ever done that? [Tony] Sure. All the time, especially when I was younger. [Brian] Yeah. Without a doubt. Carrying the heavy furniture in. Yeah. So, the floors were creaky as they were carrying the stuff in. They didn’t think any of it. It’s an older house, right? So, they’re carrying things through. And as they were walking through the living room, suddenly the guy was gone. He just disappeared, went away. [Tony] Wow. So, that was a fairly deep crawl space. That was actually a 30-foot well. Oh, my gosh. Fell right through the floor into a 30-foot well. And we’re both kind of smiling and laughing, but maybe we shouldn’t be. [Brian] Yeah. No, he survived. It was okay. [Tony] Oh, okay. [Brian] But yeah, you’re carrying like one end of a, I don’t know, a piece of furniture. And then, whoop. [Tony] Hopefully, he grabbed onto the legs of that furniture before he fell all 30 feet. [Brian] But yeah. [Tony] Wow. So, that’s a real story, huh? [Brian] Yeah. So, apparently, the previous owners renovated in 1981. [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] And they failed to put the subfloor in when they covered that particular area. And it’s not a place they would normally walk, but that’s where they were placing the furniture. Right. And so, boom. So, are you talking about those kind of falls? [Tony] Well, that one is probably less than 1% of 1% that something like that happens. But sure. I’m not sure unless we got up underneath that house, which is where you’d have to identify something like subfloor missing underneath the flooring materials and stuff like that. [Brian] Or a 30-foot well. [Tony] Yeah, a 30-foot well. Hopefully, I don’t crawl off into that thing if I were under there. Right. [Brian] Home built in 1843. Obviously, it was not originally that size because I’m assuming at some point the well was outside the home. Right. [Tony] So, this is an add-on that happened later on. [Brian] Yeah. Somewhere in the life of the house. Those old houses are awesome, but they just kind of get built on over years. [Tony] And keep adding stuff so they can actually have a functioning sewer system with a toilet and sink and stuff like that, right? Wiring. [Brian] Yep. [Tony] That was back before they invented bathrooms. They had outhouses and whatnot. [Brian] That’s right. Yep. Exactly right. All right. So, falls. So, where do we normally see tripping hazards in a home? [Tony] Well, a lot of times it’s going to be on the outside. Sidewalks, driveways, back porches, what we call concrete flat work. Yeah. [Brian] It moved. [Tony] Where that’s settled, cracked, raised up. [Brian] That happens a lot in Texas. We see a lot of sidewalks that are uneven, a lot of driveways that move. They settle and they raise. [Tony] Well, some parts of towns are as worse than others for sure. [Brian] Yeah. And what causes that, Tony? [Tony] Well, it’s just that we’ve got expansive soils and so they definitely grow with moisture uptake and they contract and they go up and down and they move around for sure, obviously. [Brian] I also see when people will buy a house and it’s new, many times they will plant a tree in the yard. And many times they will plant it closer than recommended to a driveway or a sidewalk. And that’s really great. And it looks really nice when they move in, but those trees grow over time. As they grow, their root system also grows. And a lot of times it’ll bump those sidewalks out of place. [Tony] Oh, yeah. Sometimes I question if the builders put in the trees, whether they actually cared about what it was going to look like 15 years later when it fully matured. So, yeah. [Brian] Yeah. The trees are supposed to be like 20, 25 feet apart and they put them three feet from each other. [Tony] Right. See that a lot. I’ve got some of that in my yard right now. So, yeah. So, those roots can definitely do some damage to flatwork without a doubt. [Brian] Yeah. Other places I see tripping hazards a lot and you could maybe argue this is a more important place to deal with it, although you go here less frequently, okay? And that’s the attic. Yep. I see a lot of tripping hazards in attic where people will just incorrectly put down a walkway or they’ll put decking somewhere where it wasn’t originally and they’ll buy the wrong size sheet of wood and it’ll kind of end in between two joists, right? You step on the end and it just dips way down and eventually those things break, right? You see a lot of those tripping hazards. Again, you don’t get into your attic often, but you are up there to change filters. People use it for storage. I can go back and forth on that one. Right. That may or may not be the best idea, but people do use it, at least in Texas, for storage. We don’t really have basements here. And you are up there to change filters in your HVAC unit. Sometimes your water heater’s up there as you’re up there to tweak that or change that or do maintenance on that, things like that. Keeping those areas free and clear and avoiding tripping hazards there is really important because if you fall in the attic and you land wrong, it’s a long fall. [Tony] Yeah. And it damages the inside of your ceiling. Sure. In your room. I’ve run into just areas where just the step up to the working platform in front of the furnace is not typical. So, I mean, it might be a foot and a half and they didn’t put a step in there and you’re just like, okay. Somebody later on were to step down from there, it’s quite a step, I should say. [Brian] Yeah. It’s a common place, too, where builders will put in stairs and just three or four stairs going up from one level to another to get to an HVAC unit, and they don’t put in a railing. Right. And I actually had a builder upset at me because I called out on an inspection, brother, hey, there’s no handrail here. He’s like, it’s in the attic. I’m like, it’s still stairs. I don’t know. [Tony] Right. It’s stairs. That’s it. Absolutely. [Brian] People are still going to use it. [Tony] Yep. All right. So, does that cover everything for falls, do you think? [Brian] I don’t know. I think so. I mean. Okay. [Tony] How about fire hazards? There you go. Fire hazards. Fire, fire, danger, danger. [Brian] Right. So, the biggest fire hazard in my home is the smoke detector that won’t stop beeping. Right. [Tony] Right. Absolutely. You see those people will really get mad during a conference call or something and start trying to jerk them out of the ceiling. Yes. Just because they can’t get it to stop. [Brian] Yes. And they always go off at like two in the morning. Yeah. [Tony] In the middle of the night. [Brian] I think they have a special timer on them. And then when you replace the battery in it, you go back to sleep. Five minutes later, a different one beeps. [Tony] Right. So, what does that tell you? They’re all probably, it’s the end of their life. [Brian] Yep. [Tony] Pretty much. [Brian] Most people don’t know this, but smoke detectors actually have a lifespan. You know what that is? I thought it was 10 years. 10 years. You nailed it. Ding, ding, ding. Tony gets the prize. So, if your smoke detectors are more than 10 years old, it’s more than just replacing the battery. It’s probably time to just replace the smoke detectors themselves. Nowadays, most people will want to actually replace those with something that detects more than just smoke. And so, there’s another hazard that we talked about on your list that goes along with fire, and that’s carbon monoxide. [Tony] Yes. [Brian] And so, if you’re replacing those smoke detectors, getting a combination detector that detects both the smoke and the carbon monoxide is a really great way to protect yourself against both. [Tony] Well, they sell those probably in various combinations, either single or sets. Now, you don’t need a carbon monoxide detector in every room, right? But you probably want one on every level of the home, at least. Correct? [Brian] Well, to answer your question, Tony. [Tony] Yeah. So, you can buy a combination, carbon monoxide and smoke detector, but you don’t need one. Like, say you had 10 total locations, which are all the proper locations, let’s say, for smoke detectors, but not each one of those has to be a carbon monoxide detector. You might want to put one in the hallway, outside the bedrooms, on both levels or all the levels of the home. [Brian] Yeah, definitely on all the levels of the home. And you also want to put them what’s considered near a sleeping room, right? Right. [Tony] Outside in the hallway, like I was saying. [Brian] You got it. Yep. You nailed it. We do see them though. We see people put them a lot, sometimes near, if you’ve got like a furnace in a hallway, they’ll put it near that equipment. Correct. Just in case, you know… That’s where it’s going to probably emanate first, right? [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] At least in Texas, where you’re going to find carbon monoxide most commonly is when there’s a problem with venting of some sort of appliance. The other thing having to do with firing carbon monoxide is going to be your fire barrier for your house. Now, most people don’t realize that at least modern homes are built with a fire safety barrier. [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] So do you want to explain a little bit about that and what that is? [Tony] Well, the fire safety barrier is going to be your garage ceiling and walls that are in contact with the rest of the home plus your door, right? Yeah. It’s functioning as a fire safety barrier and that’s what we’re talking about out in the garage area. You want to make sure that there’s no holes or breaks or damage to those ceilings or walls for sure because that’s going to help protect you from carbon monoxide and fire. [Brian] The door between your house and your garage… Correct. …should actually close on its own. Now, some cities don’t necessarily care whether or not people do that, but it is a more modern standard and there’s many reasons for that. As you mentioned, your door is a fire safety door. It’s not going to stop a fire. It is going to slow it down. So you always want to make sure that’s closed, especially if you’re storing gasoline or something in your garage. Right. On top of that though, there’s been a unique trend in the last, I don’t know, maybe decade or so. People have been getting cars that will start at the click of a button or the push of an app. What you don’t want to have happen is you don’t want to be back in a bedroom somewhere or something and your little one gets a hold of your phone and turns your car on while the door is open. Then that does become a carbon monoxide risk, right? Right. [Tony] Absolutely. [Brian] Yeah. [Tony] So those are really good reasons to have your carbon monoxide detectors working properly in the proper locations within your house. [Brian] What about Tony fire extinguishers? Right. What do you think about those? [Tony] Well, I think that you should definitely, if you have one, have it in the proper locations, maybe one in the kitchen, maybe one out in the garage, maybe one in the utility closet, possibly. But you should also look at those and inspect them to make sure that they’re fully charged and within their range of operation so that you don’t go to grab it, pull the pin, and nothing happens because it’s out of date. [Brian] It’s like the Three Stooges grenade. You pull the pin and nothing happens. [Tony] Confetti goes off. [Brian] No, I think more people actually should have fire extinguishers. I see them very, very rarely during an inspection. We don’t inspect the fire extinguisher itself per se, right? Yeah. But if you have them, that’s a really great thing. Kitchen fires, we did an episode several years ago on fire safety, and kitchen fires were way up there on the list. So if you don’t have at least a fire extinguisher in your kitchen, that’s something that you’re kind of, I don’t want to say at risk, but you’re leaving yourself exposed to something that could be solved quite simply. Correct. [Tony] And make sure you buy the proper fire extinguisher before kitchen fire. You just want to make sure you’ve got one that’s going to take care of grease fires and maybe electrical fires too. That would be a nice, probably ABC fire extinguisher. That’s probably the most common that you can find anywhere. And yeah, I have mine in my kitchen and one outside in the garage. [Brian] So Tony, what’s your stance on sharp objects? [Tony] Well, I try to avoid them whenever I can. Try not to run with them. I learned that lesson as a child. Put down those scissors, young man. Do not run. Obviously, sharp objects. I’ve cut my finger before, and it’s one of the worst things. Just thinking about it makes me cringe for whatever reason. Paper cuts are the same way. Sharp objects around the house. I mean, what are we talking about, Brian? [Brian] So most people think exactly what you are, scissors and knives. Yeah. But I’m not. What I’m thinking about are things like when you buy a house that’s newly constructed and they come in and they nail cabinetry together and those nails are sticking out. They don’t get there and clip them all. In some cases, it can be under a counter or it can be inside of a cabinet and you don’t notice it until you go and you slice your finger on it. I’m also thinking about other places where sharp objects happen around the home, right? The corner of a brick house is technically a sharp object. So if you pair that with the first thing we talked about, the tripping hazard, that can become a hazardous situation. Now, on an inspection report, we would document the tripping hazard. Wouldn’t necessarily document the fact that you’re going to fall and hit your head in a corner of a brick house. Right. [Tony] I have not, to this point, done that. [Brian] Yeah. And we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t catch that. But we do catch the nails that are sticking through in cabinetry when they’re newly installed, for sure. We’ve seen countertops with nails sticking through the bottom where you’d go to sit and it’d just poke you right in the leg. [Tony] Yeah. That’s the most common, I think, that I’ve seen there where you set up your chairs for that extended countertop. So you’re at countertop height and then there’s nails sticking out below that. [Brian] And then ow. There’s also sharp objects sometimes when they put flooring down. So sometimes a nail head will stick out or something will happen when they put the flooring down with the tile that will cause a sharp edge to protrude, things like that. So you’ve got to be kind of careful with some of that stuff too. [Tony] I mean, and I don’t know, this kind of falls in that category, but glass window panes. Man, you read my mind. That was what I was going next. Are pretty important that those are tempered glass. And what we look for is that stamp that tells us that it’s the proper glass so that if it breaks, it does not become a sharp object necessarily, like a large piece of glass that could cut you open. If it’s tempered, it’s treated in such a way that where it should shatter into little pieces or just crack. [Brian] Yeah. It can still cut you. [Tony] Yeah. It’s not that it’s not going to be sharp, but it’s less likely to have a big, large piece fall on you, right? [Brian] Yeah. That’s exactly right. It’s not going to break into large jagged pieces that could really slice you open. It’ll break into little, almost like gravel size pieces and they will still cut you and it will still hurt. It’s not going to hopefully slice you, you know, from top to bottom. [Tony] Right. Yeah. So you’re bleeding profusely. Exactly. [Brian] Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. You want to make sure that any object that moves horizontally, that has glass in it, has safety glass. So doors, windows that swing, we don’t see those very often, but almost all you’ll see a window that swings out. Anything that’s going to move side to side and then anything within two feet of those. So if you’ve got those little narrow windows next to your door, guess what? Those need to be safety glass, right? Shower glass needs to be safety glass. [Tony] Safety glass for sure. And we often look for shower doors that open onto another door or a cabinet that could be open on the countertop because even if it’s tempered glass, there’s something there that’s in its path. And I mean, that’s even what pretty new construction, you know, sometimes they don’t think about these things. [Brian] They don’t. Some of the biggest architecture fails we see in new houses are doors opening into doors. Right. And it gets really bad when those doors are glass. Right. So I was in a new house, the shower door, they could have installed it to where it opened and closed in the other direction. But the way they had this opening, it opened up into a cultured marble tub, or maybe it was quartz, I’m not sure, but it came right to the corner of the tub. And as the glass touched it, you heard it go tink. [Tony] Yeah. It’s not a good thing. [Brian] And I was thinking to myself, someone’s going to open that and it’s just going to go tink. And then it’s just a matter of when. And I was explaining to our client about it because he didn’t quite understand what the problem was. And then I literally said, just come with me. And I brought him into the bathroom and I opened it up and I let him hear the sound of it connecting. And he goes, oh yeah, that’s got to be it. Yeah. [Tony] Especially in a new home. Now, sometimes we see things like this when they’ve remodeled the home and the flippers don’t know what they’re doing, I guess. I wouldn’t say that. [Brian] It’s just that they don’t think about, hey, the small bathtub I replaced with a big one was small for a reason. [Tony] Yeah. They’re thinking they did a great job, but they’re not thinking that far ahead. But I mean, we’ve seen things, and this doesn’t have anything to do with glass, but just as an example where you’ve got these nice new cabinets, nice new dishwasher, but if you open the dishwasher, you can’t open the cabinets. [Brian] Yeah. [Tony] You see that a lot. It’s just they didn’t think about this sort of thing. [Brian] So I want to talk about another hazard in the home, Tony, and that’s water. Yeah. Water is a hazard for a lot of reasons. One, it’s probably the most common way homes get damaged. [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] So it’s a hazard to your home itself because it can cause significant amounts of damage, especially if it leaks for a long time. But something that we see a lot and we do test for is the water temperature. [Tony] Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah. Water temperature. So where should the water temperature be? Well, I would say 115 degrees would be my preference. [Brian] Yeah. Below 120 for sure. [Tony] But below, oh, I thought it was, okay, below 120 and over a hundred maybe just right in that area. I thought it was like below 125 for sure. [Brian] Definitely below 125. We like to see them set around 120 and lower. [Tony] Yeah. Yeah. Just so people, especially small children who don’t know any better, don’t get scalded. And that’s, I would say always, usually an adjustment that you can make. I know I have a gas water heater and I’ve got it turned up to where it’s a little bit hot. It’s on the high end and I’ve turned it down low before when I thought I was going to conserve some gas, you know, improve my gas bill or something like that. The, uh, like electric water heaters, you’ll see those to where, you know, you have to maybe remove a cover to go in there and adjust the temperature setting. [Brian] Yeah. If you’re ever adjusting the temperature on an electric water heater, shut the power first. [Tony] Okay. Yeah. [Brian] Because there’s a hazard there when there is, yeah, there’s quite a lot of electricity right next to the little dial that you turn. Seems like a bit of a design flaw to me, but that’s just kind of how they work. Yeah. But most electric water heaters work that way where you’ll pull the cover. It will actually expose you to live electricity when you do. And then there’s a little knob in there that you turn with a screwdriver. So metal object, live electricity, 240 volts of power, shut it down before you adjust it. [Tony] What could go wrong? [Brian] Right. Yeah. [Tony] Um, sounds like something I would mess with in my younger days for sure. I like the new tankless water heaters where you a lot of times just have a up and down arrow and you just push the button. [Brian] Yeah. That’s nice. It seems like the older we get, the lazier we get. I just want to push the button. Yeah. [Tony] It seems like it’s a little bit more precise maybe. Um, I don’t know. Yeah. With my gas water heater, it’s like, you know, normal hot, really hot. Yeah. Less than normal. [Brian] The thing you have to check for on a water heater, you just go outside and make sure it’s not made by Acme. [Tony] There you go. Um, one thing I was thinking about with water is, is just like, you know, leaks and slip hazards in bathrooms and or other areas where maybe there’s a certain type of tile on the floor that could be a slick in and of itself, but then add some water and you really got a hazard. [Brian] Time for a skating rink. [Tony] Yeah. Yeah. Definitely point those things out to people whenever we’re in the house and we see those types of tiles. And of course we’re always checking for water leaks. And, um, the seal around the shower door at the bottom. [Brian] Yeah. [Tony] Pretty important thing. A lot of people, when that thing becomes worn and starts to fall apart, they just pull that off. And I say a lot of people, maybe not a lot of people, but that tends to happen. [Brian] Yeah, it does for sure. And something that you brought up that people don’t think about this sort of pairs water with our first topic, which was, you know, a trip hazard or falling hazard. Sometimes we’ll see a house that people will like to take the inside outside, so to speak, right? And so they’ll redo a porch in a way that makes it look more like the inside of their house. It’ll have normal furniture on it and things like that. When they do that, a lot of times they’ll redo the floor with tile. When they do that, they’re not always careful about the type of tile that they put down. And then rain happens, sprinkler systems happen, and that tile gets wet and it’s not really a tile that’s designed to be walked on when it’s wet. And you do, yeah, you get that whoop. And so that’s something else to be kind of looking out for, you know, if you have a home. [Tony] For sure. Yeah, we do see that quite often, more than you would think. [Brian] More than you would think, for sure. I want to talk about one other hazard in a home. Okay. Other hazard I want to talk about is, I guess you could call this more of a structural hazard, right? And it’s not even really a hazard so much as it is, I guess, a plea. A plea to not skip an inspection, especially if you’re in a home that’s had some significant remodeling done, or if you’re buying a home that’s had some significant remodeling done. You, not very long ago, looked at a house that more or less had many of the load-bearing walls removed. Correct. And it was replaced by what? A big beam in the attic. Correct. And while that’s super common, and we see that a lot, what happens if that’s done wrong? [Tony] I’m assuming that the house will begin to slowly collapse. [Brian] That’s exactly what will happen, right? [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] But we’re not engineers. Correct. So when we look at that, how do we know that that was done right? [Tony] Well, we can certainly look at it, you know, and see where it’s, how it’s attached, what it’s resting on, what walls it’s resting on, whatever the rest of the framing’s attached to that beam. Really, an engineer should have designed and put together a plan that’s approved for the installation of that beam. [Brian] Yeah, that’s right. And that really, again, I’m not a realtor, but that really should be in your disclosure. Right. And so, if you get a home inspection, and they say, hey, someone removed a load-bearing wall here, and you don’t see that in your disclosure, it’s probably time to start asking questions. Right. And you would never know that, right, unless you had the inspection in the first place. And we do see things all the time in areas that you wouldn’t normally look, right? We see trusses that have been cut to make room for certain things. We see load-bearing walls that have been removed. We see pier and beam foundations that have been maybe repaired in a less than standard way. [Tony] Yeah. [Brian] We see things in places that you wouldn’t look. And those, every one of those things I just mentioned can cause not only a hazard to you, but a hazard to your home over time. Those can all become structural problems. And I don’t want to put fear into people. I don’t think that just because something is done in a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean that your house is going to fall over on you. [Tony] Right. [Brian] It might, but probably not. Framing is very forgiving. Right. What we’re saying is, it definitely should give you pause to ask questions, to bring in an engineer, to do the things you need to do to make sure that what you’re moving into doesn’t have a hidden problem. You know, and unless you get that inspection, odds are really, really good. You’re never going to know until it’s too late. Good point. So, now that I’ve brought us all down. [Tony] Well, you know, it seems like you would think, right? You would think that if someone’s having that done, the person doing that job would do the correct job and get all the correct plans and permits, but you don’t know. And if you haven’t been told beforehand, then that is suspicious for sure, if that’s not in the disclosure. Like you said, there’s just indicators that you pointed out that lead us to go, okay, what’s going on here? An older home where all of a sudden this home has got all the wide open concepts of open living, like modern homes and stuff like that. It’s like, well, usually there’s houses like this have walls everywhere, you know? [Brian] Yeah, I moved into this house built in 1920 and there’s no walls anywhere. It’s great. It’s open concept. [Tony] Anyway. [Brian] Tony, how would you sort of summarize what we talked about today? [Tony] Well, I mean, there’s a lot of things or items in a home that… (This file is longer than 30 minutes. Go Unlimited at TurboScribe.ai to transcribe files up to 10 hours long.).

Brian Botch

Brian Botch

Brian is the owner of House Fluent Inspections and is licensed by the Texas Real Estate Commission as a professional real estate inspector (TX License # 22824 ). In addition, he is certified by the National Swimming Pool Foundation as a Certified Pool Inspector.

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