Ask the Home Inspector

It’s not uncommon to find cracks in a brick veneer sided home. Lots of different reasons are possible. Most often in our area, it’s minor settling of the slab and or foundation. An inspector would have to look at the entire homes surroundings to help determine the cause and perhaps any correction needed. In this case, the cracks are from the slab footing cracking due to water being directed toward the home. Water sitting next to a foundation is never a good idea.

So many things have been neglected under this home I recently inspected, that by the time I saw it, it's a disaster! Water has been running underneath, a lack of proper ventilation, leaky plumbing from supply pipes, shower, toilet and sink water make a great place for mold. There were some floor joists I could literally put my hand straight through without any resistance.

This picture of an infrared thermometer shows the temperature in an attic that Jimmy St.Romain took the other day. Way too hot to stay in very long. You can actually get blisters on your hands when you hold onto the framing.

At a home inspection the other day a resourceful home owner reused his beer bottle cap to stop a drain leak on his aged water heater.

These shims were supposed to be holding up the home in the crawlspace. This customer bought their home 2 years ago. When they purchased it from a house flipper they were told they just completed over 20k worth of repairs to the foundation and roof. A few days ago they were selling the home and had a home inspection done. Things didn't work out so well for them. The "flipper" did not have the structural repairs under the home repaired properly! Now it will cost the sellers another 10k or so to repair the repairs. I found no footings under the crawlspace piers. Several of the piers were crooked and held up to the house with some flimsy shims. This column above has a broken block. The photo above, the column that was added for strength was resting on the sub floor and one of the blocks is installed backwards. It didn't even touch a floor joist or beam, has no footing and is very crooked.

I used this drone to get some Ariel shots of the roof for a Florida Wind Mitigation report. It worked really nicely. No climbing up on 3rd floor roofs for me!

I was inspecting a new home in this particular subdivision, and when I drove around the corner I got a big surprise. Not as big as the builders got later! For an unknown reason some of the roof truss' fell over. Several of them were damaged and I'm really glad that no one was in the portable toilet as it got knocked over too.