We bought a fully renovated, investor flipped home 6 months ago. We had John from Homespec perform the inspection per recommendation from our real estate agent. John noted that all in all the house was in good shape, minus a few very minor items that came up per his report.
After a week went by from living in the house, we had to do a full bathroom remodel due to extremely poor craftsmanship in the upstairs bathroom. It turned out that the Sellers lied on the disclosures and the entire house was done without a permit. While I do not blame any of the bathroom issues or permit issues on John, where I have issue is what came out of calling city inspectors and contractors out for our permited bathroom remodel.
Both the city inspector that came for the bathroom permit and our contractor noted a number of issues with our house in total. First was the electrical in our kitchen. It is done so poorly that the entire kitchen needs rewired. The contractor and city inspector were not even looking for that but noticed it literally within 5 seconds of entering out house. The issues were mainly the placement of outlets (one is directly over the sink) and missing outlets on other walls. Further, the fuse box on the side of our yard (that was inspected by John) is completely wrong. There is no fuse for the built in microwave which is another issue that must be dealt with to bring the kitchen and electrical panel up to code. In addition, we had a chimney cleaner come out and he said that we most likely would need a new chimney due to significant number of cracks on the chimney up by the roof. This was not discussed in our inspection. fortunately the chimney is solid and the cracks just need patched. Further on the chimney, John mentioned that some of the stone in the fireplace are loose. When asked if this was a big deal he said no and that we can get caulking from Home Depot for very cheap and caulk if ourselves and it will be perfectly fine. As such, we did not ask the sellers for that repair. Turns out the chimney sweep and chimney repair man laughed at that and said we need about $1,000 worth of masonry work on our chimney and fireplace. They do not do masonry work either so I am confident that they arent just trying to get money out of me. Further, the city inspector and our contractor (family friend) confirmed that the fireplace needs masonry work to be in working order.
All in all, I would highly not recommend using this company and John. We are extremely dissatisfied with the inspection and now are looking at upwards of $5,000 to $10,000 in issues we need to fix to bring our house up to current building standards and safety. This is on top of the $10,000 we already spent on the bathroom remodel.
We relied on the expertise of John and his inspection. The city inspector and our contractor said all of these are items that any decent inspector should have noticed. Now we are stuck with a house that needs some serious repairs to bring it up to the standards of other homes in our neighborhood. read more
