Season 4, EP. 1 – Podcast Transcript: Debunking Common Home Inspection Myths

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[Tony]
Welcome to the House Fluent Podcast. I’m Tony. And I’m Brian.

We like to provide helpful tips and tricks for your home inspection process.

[Brian]
And to maintain your home.

[Tony]
And maintain your home.

[Brian]
Perfect. What are we talking about today, Tony?

[Tony]
Building a home maintenance schedule. A home maintenance schedule? For every season.

[Brian]
What’s a home maintenance schedule?

[Tony]
Well, that’s just things that need to be taken care of on a periodic basis so that…

[Brian]
Wait, I own a house? Yeah, that’s right. I have to do stuff now?

[Tony]
Yeah, you’re supposed to.

[Brian]
Like what?

[Tony]
What do I have to do? Well, it could be your roof, your air conditioning system, gutters cleaned, sprinkler systems.

[Brian]
Nobody told me those were things I had to do.

[Tony]
A lot of people just don’t think about these things.

[Brian]
So why would we want to have a checklist? What would be the point?

[Tony]
I mean, just so that that can help you understand what’s coming up, when’s the right time to do it, how it’s done, you know, either by yourself or a professional you might hire to come and take a look at these things.

[Brian]
Alright, so is this just like post-it notes around my house? Just remember, I don’t know, trim the trees?

[Tony]
Oh, no. We have something that really kind of outlines everything that you could do. And we could make that available to everyone, I’m sure, on our website, right?

[Brian]
Yeah, absolutely. You can find it at HouseFluent.com. And it’s actually a home maintenance schedule.

It’s pretty cool. It’s something we put together. It’s, you know, it’s not all inclusive, but if you were to do everything on this list, it would give you a good start towards maintaining your home.

And they’re not difficult things, really. We’re going to go through them here in a minute, and we’re going to talk about them in obviously more detail. But most of the things on this list are pretty simple things that are kind of common sense in a lot of ways, right?

Right.

[Tony]
And as home inspectors, what we see is a lot of times they’re not being taken care of.

[Brian]
Yeah.

[Tony]
And it can become costly over time.

[Brian]
It can.

[Tony]
If you do not maintain your home, then it’s just going to cost you more and more as you let it go.

[Brian]
Yeah, and it’s kind of like doing the dishes, right? The more you let them stack up, the harder it is to do them later. And so when you go to sell your home, a lot of the things we’re going to talk about today, actually, if you’re not doing them, it can cause problems in your home that lead to expensive things, right?

They lead to opportunity costs that could happen when you’re negotiating. People could ask you to reduce your price. You could be asked to provide some repairs for something that maybe you weren’t expecting to provide repairs for.

Or you could be asked to provide some money back as part of the deal to maybe take care of some of these things. They could have all been prevented by just having a handy schedule of maintenance items.

[Tony]
And if you do a pre-inspection with us, we can certainly point out those things that you could take care of.

[Brian]
Oh, yeah. Pre-listing. Pre-listing.

And we recommend those highly. Definitely.

[Tony]
Yeah. Sorry. Soapbox again.

So we’re heading into summer really close. But I mean, we just finished up spring. But a lot of these things are tasks or maintenance tasks are seasonal.

Right. So they’re triggered by the change of weather and the events that are about to occur.

[Brian]
They are. And since you have the checklist, maybe you could tell us what some of them are.

[Tony]
Oh, sure. Right. So here we are.

You’ve got inspect exterior for damage. That’s during the spring.

[Brian]
Yeah. And that’s true. Right.

So at least if you live where we live, God’s not happy with us right now. I don’t know if people know this, but hail, thunderstorms, tornadoes, it’s all been coming our way this spring.

[Tony]
It’s happening as we speak.

[Brian]
Yes, it is. Outside, I can see the trees breaking.

[Tony]
And there was something here just the other day that, as we know, just networking with different people, that there’s a lot of wind damage. You may not have received hail damage, but you could have received branches that got blown through your yard onto your roof, damaged some singles, gutters, vent covers, things of that nature.

[Brian]
Yeah. So going around your house and just doing kind of a basic visual, you don’t have to do a detailed inspection like we would do, but you can look for obvious things, right? You can look for places where siding’s loose or if you see shingles laying on the ground, you know, those kinds of things.

You can look up and in many cases you can see most of your roof. If you, you know, you want a more detailed inspection, obviously we’re happy to help with that. But just do a basic kind of walk around.

And, you know, I do this at my house. This is one of the, probably one of the few things on the list I actually do on a regular basis. But I do walk around my house.

I actually, I get up on my roof. But if you’re not comfortable with that, I wouldn’t recommend it. And I probably do that at least twice a year.

And I’m looking for things like water damage, you know, siding that’s swollen up. I’m looking for, you know, damage to my roof, those kinds of things.

[Tony]
Okay. Yeah. I mean, you should check that your gutters and downspouts, make sure they’re not loose.

[Brian]
Caulking around windows.

[Tony]
Caulking around the windows. Well, I was thinking that just as we finish up spring and we’re getting into those hot months of summer, you know, you really want to not only service your air conditioning unit, right?

[Brian]
Oh, yeah, definitely.

[Tony]
That’s a big one at the end of spring, right?

[Brian]
Yeah. And here’s a good tip for people. If you don’t know this, right, good, reputable HVAC companies will actually have something called a service plan.

And if you reach out to them, you for like $180 a year, they will come out and service your unit twice a year. And they’ll sometimes they will include filters in that and everything else, which if they don’t go to our website and get them.

[Tony]
Yeah, but order filters and they’re sent to you as as you need them.

[Brian]
Yeah, absolutely.

[Tony]
Your schedule.

[Brian]
But but if you get on a maintenance plan, very often they will discount parts and labor if anything’s broken with your air conditioning system. So definitely call around to find a reputable company. If you don’t know one, we’re happy to recommend one to you.

We don’t with with any contractor we recommend we don’t take any kickbacks or anything from them. We’re just they’re just good people that we know in the industry.

[Tony]
So so you say still gaps around windows and doors now. So I know my house is in need of that now. I can go to the.

[Brian]
Yeah, mine is too.

[Tony]
And get the the is there a proper there’s like many different sealants and stuff. Sure. I’m sure there’s one that’s labeled and is just for your windows and your doors and openings like that.

[Brian]
Yeah. I mean, most of the time. Right.

It’s a silicone based sealant. Yeah. The most important thing is to make sure that if it’s exterior, if it’s an exterior application, that you’re getting something rated for the outside.

If not, it’s still going to work. You’re just going to replace it a whole lot faster. Right.

[Tony]
Right.

[Brian]
And interior the same way. If it’s inside the house, you want something rated for the inside. If it’s a wet area, you want something that’s going to be specific for a bathroom or a kitchen.

And usually the labels will say right on the product, what it is and what it’s for. And then the second most important thing, especially if you’re married out there, is the color, the color. Make sure it matches.

[Tony]
You’ve got white, gray and almond and almond.

[Brian]
Yeah, that’s right. Those are the three most common for sure. And then black.

And there’s a bunch of them out there. All right. Ivory.

[Tony]
So on here, we’ve got inspect clean decks, patios. So.

[Brian]
Yeah. So decks over the winter and the spring take an absolute beating. And if you are not keeping up with keeping your deck sealed, which most people don’t, they just lay it down and call it good.

A lot of times those boards come loose. They’re warped. They may not look like they’re loose, but if you just kind of pull up on them a little bit, then they kind of come out.

So those are things just, you know, just check on those things, especially if your deck is elevated. You don’t want to lean on a railing, have it, you know, give a little bit and then suddenly you’re falling three feet to the ground. Right.

[Tony]
Yeah. I used to stay in my deck every several years. I think it was.

[Brian]
That’s quite the easiest way I found. Now, we don’t have a deck now, but I do this on my fences and I’ve had decks in the past. The easiest way I’ve found to do it is you can get that deck seal stuff.

And if you put it in a pest sprayer, just run down to your local home improvement store. You get one of those pest sprayers that allows you to pressurize it and just just spray it on that. That seems to work really well.

I’ve got one.

[Tony]
Yes.

[Brian]
Now, once once you’ve done that, you’re pretty much done with it. Like it, it comes the whole thing up. It’s sort of a.

[Tony]
Oh, yeah. With you with that. Yeah.

Material. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. But you can dispose of it.

[Brian]
Yeah. So it’s sort of a one time and throw it away. So don’t go after the most expensive sprayer you can find.

Now, here’s a big one for summer.

[Tony]
And that’s the trim, the trees and the shrubs. Yes. Very much of those.

You’re saying during summer months, is that the best time to trim them?

[Brian]
So I we actually trim ours in February. And the reason we do that is we have deciduous trees. So they drop all their leaves, all the sap, all the the stuff goes back into the trunk of the tree around February, at least here in North Texas.

And the trees dormant. And so because the tree is dormant, it actually when you when you trim it or prune it back in those months, it doesn’t take as much out of the tree. Right.

It doesn’t. The energy when it comes back in the spring kind of comes back a little better. It seems to just seems to work better.

But that’s when we do ours here is in February. But what happens throughout the spring and the reason you might want to consider trimming back in the summer is you get a lot of growth in the spring. And part of that’s because we get a lot of water.

Other part of that is that’s just the natural time of year when things come into bloom and they begin to to grow and they’re doing their thing. And so by the time summer gets here, really what you’re trimming is the part that’s now rubbing your roof that maybe wasn’t in February. Right.

And you’re trimming that bush that’s now growing into your window and up under the siding and allowing the ants to crawl into your house. That kind of thing. Right.

And, you know, whereas, you know, when you trimmed it in February, you trimmed it pretty far back. But now it’s had several months to grow.

[Tony]
I’ve got some of that going on right now. So I know along with HOA concerns and rules and whatnot, but then also even the city has rules that on the height of branches over a street, it’s like 12 foot maybe. And then over sidewalks, eight foot and different things like that, which you need to be aware of because, you know, you trim those back.

So people don’t hit their head or poke their eyeball out or are just because that’s the rules and that’s the way it goes.

[Brian]
My case, when you’re mowing the lawn, it doesn’t knock you off the track.

[Tony]
That’s why I always raise the canopy so I can mow the yard when I was mowing.

[Brian]
Yeah, exactly.

[Tony]
It’s like when you were mowing.

[Brian]
All right. Now we see how you list here. What?

When you were mowing.

[Tony]
I see.

[Brian]
I know.

[Tony]
Well, I had to stop at some point. Then the sprinkler system, our irrigation system. We did a little podcast regarding that.

[Brian]
We did a podcast. We also have a video on it that kind of gives you a really good overview of how the system works and the different components of it and gives you some tips on how to maintain it. So that’s a great resource for people.

They can grab that right off our YouTube channel or our website. And it’s well worth six minutes of your life to watch that, I think.

[Tony]
I mean, just it’s important to not have water leaking.

[Brian]
Yes.

[Tony]
You don’t want to pay those types of bills. Well, expensive as it is. And so.

[Brian]
Yeah. And so box number two, water around your foundation in Texas is bad. Sorry.

It’s bad. It’s bad to water around your. No, no, no, no.

That’s not what I’m saying. A water pooling around your pooling water pooling.

[Tony]
Yeah.

[Brian]
No, you definitely want to water around your foundation, but you want to keep it consistent. Right. And when you’ve got a broken sprinkler system, that tends not to happen.

What ends up happening is you get an area or two where water will pool or it will erode. And then it can it can actually move your house. I don’t think people really realize that.

But water is, you know, one of the biggest one of the controlling water is one of the most important things to do with your house, whether that’s in your house or around your house, controlling where the water is, how it flows, all that stuff. It’s really, really, really important.

[Tony]
You want it consistent. Essentially, you don’t want to dry, then wet, then dry, then wet.

[Brian]
Yeah.

[Tony]
As much as you can control that.

[Brian]
Our soil here is like a sponge. And if you’ve ever let a sponge dry up on the countertop and then you just drop a little bit of water, you know, maybe on a corner and you see the corner swell.

[Tony]
Mm hmm.

[Brian]
That’s what happens with our soils here. And so you can imagine if your house was sitting on that sponge and one of the corners was, you know, significantly higher than the rest. What would happen to your to your house?

Keeping that consistent is really important. It’s it’s not about necessarily underwatering or overwatering. It’s about keeping it the same.

Right.

[Tony]
And that’s where your your your rain control device comes in handy when it’s.

[Brian]
Yeah.

[Tony]
Like it’s been like, you know, like it is right now. Run your sprinklers system on top of everything else. Now, one just I thought I’d bring up real quick.

I saw someone advertise, you know, putting our installing is a plumber, you know, around the perimeter of your home. A drip irrigation or something.

[Brian]
Yeah.

[Tony]
For your foundation. And that’s a good idea, you think, or maybe.

[Brian]
I mean, we see those. Right. We see him.

Oh, you see him. Quite a few inspections. Yeah.

What I would say about that is, again, it’s not about the amount necessarily of water. It’s about keeping it consistent. And if if that’s what you need, then I think that’s what you need.

But you should consult for sure. A landscape professional soils engineer or somebody, somebody like that, before you just sort of randomly go changing the you know, the way that you are handling that.

[Tony]
OK, good advice. So here we’re moving into fall on our list and we’ve got flush the hot water heater tank, which that’s one that that’s why nobody does.

[Brian]
Yeah, nobody does that.

[Tony]
And check the water heater anode rod.

[Brian]
Maybe you could explain what the anode rod is.

[Tony]
Oh, the anode rod. That’s what actually what keeps the corrosion from occurring. That’s my my basics.

It just it it keeps the inside from corroding. Right. So it kind of takes on that corrosion and then you can change it out.

And then it’s protecting the inside of your water tank. Sorry, we had you hear that.

[Brian]
Yeah. So I had to go deal with the phone in the background.

[Tony]
It was a bit loud. So that was my definition of an anode rod, that it’s just they’re protecting the inside of your unit from corrosion.

[Brian]
That’s exactly it. Yeah. And they do degrade over time.

So the idea behind it is it’s a sacrificial rod. Yeah. It it takes the brunt, essentially, of the corrosion and it gets eaten away, essentially.

Yeah. Instead of the inside of your hot water heater. And most people don’t even know that it’s there.

It’s up on top.

[Tony]
You can just like unbolt it maybe. And then if it’s not totally disintegrated, remove it. Yes.

And put another one in there.

[Brian]
If you’re not if you’re uncomfortable with that in any way.

[Tony]
Yeah.

[Brian]
Talk to a plumber. Right. That’s probably the best idea.

Yeah. And I’m sure just like an HVAC company, they have maintenance plans where they’ll come out and service those things, you know, for a lower cost. And it’s almost always to your benefit to have that service done because it’s less usually to have it serviced and maintained than it is to replace.

The whole water. Yeah. The whole hot water heater.

Yeah, exactly. So you just get more life, more usable life out of it.

[Tony]
And of course, we’ve got in here a going into winter. We want to make sure all of our water pipe and even the.

[Brian]
Oh, yes.

[Tony]
In some cases.

[Brian]
Insulate those pipes. Insulated. So here’s what I will say about insulating water pipes.

If you have a water softener on your house, there’s a very, very, very, very good chance that you have water pipes outside your house. Because most of the time when they put those on, what they do is they actually run. It’s usually PVC, which is not super great for cold water, cold weather.

But if it’s not PVC, it’s then the next thing I see most often is copper. Also not super great for freezing. And what they do essentially is they come right off of wherever your water shut off is and they’ll come up the outside of the wall.

Usually it’s of a garage and then they’ll go right into the water softener. And the reason they do that is because it’s much less expensive to install it that way than it is to maybe go through an insulated wall or to jackhammer your floor. Right.

There’s there’s a lot less intrusive. There’s a whole lot of reasons why why they do it that way. But the result of that is that you now have exposed water supply piping on the outside of your house.

[Tony]
We’ve seen that before or even on and in the inside of your garage. Yeah. You know, if it’s not insulated, it probably needs to be because that that space is not conditioned.

Right.

[Brian]
Correct. Yeah. Also, if you have water pipes in your attic, that’s a more of a modern plumbing design, but they do run them through attics.

[Tony]
You know, I see another one on here and I’m going to add something that I bet you didn’t think about. And that’s, you know, the dishwasher filter.

[Brian]
Oh, yes.

[Tony]
That kind of goes along with rage hood filters.

[Brian]
Yes.

[Tony]
To pull those out. We’ve got that at winter. Now, the dishwasher filter could be changed or not changed, but cleaned, I guess, more often depending on your your your your your water, whether it’s hard water.

[Brian]
Yeah, that’s I mean, that’s kind of it on the schedule. Right. So we’ve kind of gone we’ve gone through all the months.

Sure. And we talked about the fact that you can you can download our maintenance schedule. You know, people these days don’t they don’t go around, you know, taping.

Well, OK, we have a friend that goes around with post-it notes. But aside from her. Right.

I don’t know very many people that go around, you know, taping schedules to wall calendars. Right. And things like that these days.

Most of us live and die on our phones. So what are some ways maybe that people can incorporate this into their their scheduling system or the way they handle scheduling in their life?

[Tony]
Events in their calendar. Right. Calendar events.

[Brian]
Yeah. Calendar events. So you can take everything in our maintenance schedule and plop it in a calendar event.

So one of the things I do around our house is we we do have a reverse osmosis water system. And of course, those have filters and those filters need changed. And the very first time I ignored the alarm on my phone and then eventually water doesn’t taste good anymore.

I had to change the filter. And but but I do have it as a calendar reminder. Right.

And so it pops up and says, hey, time to change the filter. The other thing that people can do right is you can get on a service to have filters delivered to your house like HVAC filters. Right.

We obviously bias. We offer that on our Web site. But but when you’re on a schedule like that, it’s it’s hard to ignore when it’s time to change it because it just shows up on your front door.

Hey, it’s here. It’s this big thing I need to do something with.

[Tony]
Now what? No. Right.

I thought you’re going to say you’re going to you’re going to mail them a list every quarter.

[Brian]
Well, I don’t know. I guess, you know, if you really if you really want it to their filters, if you really want what we’ll do is we can put you on an email list.

[Tony]
There you go.

[Brian]
And then we don’t have one right now for this specifically, but if people are interested and they reach out, we’ll put one together.

[Tony]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Brian]
We’ll put a maintenance email list together. Why not? A reminder.

[Tony]
Anything we can do to help.

[Brian]
That’s right. All right. Well, we hope everybody got a little something out of this podcast today and really do appreciate everybody that listens to us.

We hope you hit that like and that subscribe button and that we hope that you do share it. You can find us on all the socials. We’re kind of everywhere.

Facebook, Instagram, all the all the big ones. One day I’ll make Tony a tick tocker, but we’re not there today.

[Tony]
Oh, yeah, we’re not. That’s something to look forward to. For sure.

[Brian]
Very good. Well, you can always find us at house fluent dot com. And if you need an inspection, always feel free to reach out to us there.

Thanks, guys. So, Tony, how are you going to break the weather?

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