Yesterday we had our house inspected by an inspector of our choosing (i.e. not the builder’s inspector, and not the city inspector, but someone working for us). This was something we wanted to do before everything gets covered in drywall. Everyone recommends doing this during the house building process, and everyone is right.
Our inspector was pretty awesome. He has years of experience as both an inspector and a general contractor. He went over the house for 2.5 hours with us in the morning, then spent the entire afternoon writing up a report. After work, he met us with a 100-page binder full of his report, all the photos he took of our house, excerpts from the parts of the building code that have been violated, spec sheets and installation instructions for parts that were put in wrong…the whole shebang. He also gave us a summary of all of that to give to our builder. Yep, he was awesome.
We knew there would be issues, and there are. The roof needs to be redone, at least 75% of it anyway, because it looks like the installed it in the dark or the rain or in about 5 minutes. There are humps and buckled shingles all over the place, and we’re not really in love with the idea of all our shingles blowing off in the next tropical storm or hurricane. There are a couple structural issues — some overnotched 2×6 boards, a wiggly half-wall, a few roof rafters that need shoring up — and a few miscellaneous items — a can light that’s smushed up against ducting (fire hazard), pinched ducting — but overall I think it went pretty well.
Tonight we go over with our list, present it to the builder, and say “fix these things so that they meet code, or else.”
Good call on the inspector. We had ours inspected twice, including once before drywall went up. Jaclyn’s parents came out for the first one (her dad used to be in construction) and they inspected based on Florida’s code, which is much tougher. Our builder actually did a pretty good job and even fixed the stuff he didn’t necessarily have to because of the differing codes.
Seriously, inspectors are awesome. This guy sounds really good. Definitely a good catch on the roof, there was tens of thousands of dollars (maybe hundreds of thousands) just in my little corner of hte neighborhood during Ike because of bad roofing.
Great call on getting an inspector out there! We didn’t build our house, but it had never been lived in. Our inspector found quite a few things that needed to be corrected and fortunately, our builder was great about it.