We used Paul twice in the past year as we searched for our new home. Both times he was professional and reasonably priced. During our first inspection, Paul caught tons of red flags and helped us walk away from a property that would end up costing us big dollars to fix. We chose to use him again for our second try.
His inspection helped us negotiate two relatively major items in our contract. We decided to purchase our second home, however within 3 weeks of moving in, we have two high dollar items to address that were not caught during inspection. One is a leaking main waste water pipe in our basement whenever toilets are flushed or the shower is run. The leak is an active leak that is easily visible in the basement and causes a large mess, even with one or two flushes. We have been quoted to need all of the piping replaced as it is the original copper piping and degraded.
The second is water seeping into the basement. Paul had mentioned that this water was likely due to rain water as there were no gutters on the house. An easy thing to address, however when speaking to the gentlemen setting up our new sump pump, I passively asked him about this area. He told me that there were "stair cracks" in the wall which signified that an outside force was pushing on the wall causing it to crack. It can be repaired but would likely be in the ballpark of $10,000 as they need to reinforce it with carbon fiber and then patch the cracks. They actually asked us "did you actually have an inspector come out?", which was alarming.
These two items together will likely run us $20,000, potentially more, and are major items that I would have assumed an inspector would have noticed.l given that they were fully visible.
Paul was an extremely nice guy and as I mentioned had caught many major items in our first contract, however I would be remiss to not mention these major items for a future client. read more