March 16th, 2010 by Missy
Well, I’m home from the house inspection. It wasn’t terrible, but didn’t go as well as I was hoping for. The house has a lot of things that need to be fixed, but nothing majorly expensive. The problem, I suppose, is that a lot of these things must be fixed or the house won’t get through VA. This isn’t a comprehensive list.. just a few major things I remember from the walkthrough (the inspector will send an inspection report later).
The heating / air conditioning unit doesn’t turn off. I don’t mean it is constantly heating / cooling the house (it heats and cools to the temp you set it to), but the power consuming part of it just keeps running all the time. Obviously.. er.. bad for power costs.
The doors to the garage (one going into the house and one going out to the yard) both need to be replaced. The one going into the house has no weather stripping and doesn’t auto-close which is a fire hazard or something. The one going out to the yard has a large “homemade” doggie door cut into it, and doesn’t open.
One of the gates into the yard doesn’t close properly and has no mechanism to auto-lock (required because of the pool). Strangely, the other door DOES auto-lock.
The garage door doesn’t close or open. It opens like 1/3 of the way and then gets stuck. When you close it, it bounces back up to 1/3 open. Can be closed manually.
Several GFI outlets need to be installed in place of current ones.
In many places electrical wiring is done incorrectly. Not like the walls need to be ripped down and redone, but a lot of the outlets are just.. wrong. Whoever owned the house before obviously thought that he was a handyman, but was delusional.
The plumbing in the kitchen is leaky and set up incorrectly (no hot water to the sink).
The stove does not turn off.
There are also some random, smaller things that aren’t necessarily VA deal breakers.
All of the hose bibs outside need some item (I can’t remember what the inspector called it) that prevents water from backing up into the house.
The auto-fill thinger for the pool has a broken pipe that keeps er.. water from getting to it. You don’t -have- to have autofill, but it sure is nice and the system is already installed..
The irrigation system is very leaky and needs the pipes where you turn it on replaced. Some heads need to be replaced.
There are no locks on the front door. At all. Only on the security screen.
Several outlets and light switches are missing face plates. These were not missing previously, so hopefully were just removed and set aside when the house was painted.
The water heater is probably not looking at living for too much longer.
That’s all I can really think of for now. I’m sure there was a lot more, but my mind is drawing a blank. Anyway, took lots of pictures but just not feeling in the mood to post them. If the bank gets back to us and says that they’ll fix this crap, then I’ll post pics. Until then, I guess I don’t see much point since we might not end up with the house anyway.