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Home inspections are necessary and usually reassuring, but paying a professional to check out the house you want to buy doesn't absolve you of the need to familiarize yourself with how things work.
Knowledge is power, and arming yourself with as much information as possible will ensure that, even if there are surprises in the weeks and months after settlement, you can deal with them rationally and efficiently.
That's not to say that you need to be a licensed electrician or roofer to own a house, although that probably would save you money. What it does mean is that when you're looking at a house for the first time, you should try all light switches, check ceilings for tell-tale signs of leaks, and look carefully at basements, attics, appliances, features, and systems so you can ask questions later.
Sometimes a buyer can fall so in love with a house that he or she will miss important features.
Consider a house built in 1904, in an era when coal furnaces were all the rage and fireplaces considered passe. But, with an eye on tradition, the builder placed a mantel in the spot where a fireplace typically would be located.
A minute or two spent in front of the mantel would have easily demonstrated that the piece was just decoration -- a place from which to hang the kids' stockings at Christmas.
Instead, topping a list of questions from the buyers -- who chose not to have a home inspection -- was a question for the seller after the sale agreement was signed: How long has the fireplace not worked? The question is a clear example of our tendency to buy houses with our hearts and not our heads.
Even in this age of disclosure, many sellers remain unwilling to provide much information, even regarding problems that were taken care of long ago.
For a while, some home inspection firms were pushing the idea of "pre-inspections," in which a seller hired an inspector to come in before the house goes on the market. The theory was that if a seller knows about potential problems in advance, he or she can fix them before the buyer or the buyer's inspector can find them, thus removing pesky variables from the transaction.
Most real estate agents don't like the idea.
"I think a seller inspection generally invites legal problems," said John Duffy, owner of Duffy Real Estate in Narberth, Pa. "When sellers ask whether or not they should, we usually recommend against it. The major reason is that if that the buyer is going to pay $400 to have his own inspection done, and if that inspection uncovers something that the seller's didn't, it could become a legal issue," he said.
Even though ignorance doesn't necessarily absolve a seller of responsibility for defects, the burden of finding and getting problems fixed falls on the buyer.
What should a buyer do?
One recommendation is to spend $24.95 on a book I'll be using when I buy my next house (I will use a home inspector, of course, because I'm willing to pay for a second pair of eyes) Contractor/inspector Rex Cauldwell wrote Inspecting a House (Taunton Press, Newtown, CT) as an unofficial training manual for home inspectors but it can easily double as a home buyers' guidebook as well.
Older houses present more of a challenge to professionals and consumers alike because they have features that haven't been part of houses for decades.
One example is the pole gutter, which does the same job as the ones that are clamped to the edges of roofs but is integral with the soffitt. Because the gutters are part of the house, they cannot be adjusted if the house settles, for example, so water will pond on them, they will rust, and the wood below them will rot.
It is much more expensive problem to handle than those associated with the modern gutter, and a lot of roofers just don't deal with them anymore. So if these gutters haven't been regularly maintained -- washing them with white vinegar or diluted bleach to remove mold, then coated with tinner's paint that deters rust -- you have very expensive, and perhaps insurmountable problems.
Molding is another. Our ancestors got pretty fancy, and some molding is often unique to a particular house. If there is molding missing inside the house, and it is rotting outside the house, it will cost a lot of money to have it duplicated, if the lumber yard can do it at all.
Inside, the trick is to harvest it from the closet. Outside, spend the money or compromise with something that may look enough like it so that caulk and paint will hide the differences.
The pole gutter issue is structural while the molding is somewhat aesthetic, but solving those problems should play a role in whether or not you will buy the house and for the price the sellers are asking.
Remember, too, that the experts don't have all the answers, and if they don't sound absolutely sure about something, pay for the second opinion. If the inspector isn't sure about the seriousness of a crack in the basement wall, hire a structural engineer. If the roof is old, hire a roofer who has expertise in old roofs.
About 15 years ago, a Philadelphia church was having problems with squirrels, and brought in a pest-control company. While the technician was inspecting the church tower, he noticed evidence of powder beetles and suggested treatment.
The church called in an expert from Independence Hall. The bell tower had a powder beetle problem, all right, but the infestation had taken care of itself 150 years before.
No treatment was necessary.
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