Love's Real Stories

Answering all the real estate questions you never knew you had.

Category: Inspections

March 19, 2015

The Shaft

“It’s grandfathered in,” said the Listing Agent.

I had called the agent on behalf of my clients, Jenny and Brad, who were writing an offer on her Listing.

“Is there a building permit for the Family Room addition built on to the back of the house?” I asked.

“My sellers say it’s been there forever.”

I passed the news on to Jenny and Brad that the Family Room addition had been “grandfathered in” and we left it at that.

Six months after we closed escrow on the house, Jenny and Brad filed for a building permit to add a bathroom to a section of the Family Room.

Brad called me. “We have a little problem with the house,” he said anxiously. “The Building Inspector who came to the house told us the Family Room is not “grandfathered in”.

The Building Inspector condemned the Family Room and served Jenny and Brad with a notice of Code violation.

When I related the situation to my mentor, KDV, he said, “Looks like you sold your people the gold mine, babe, but they got the shaft.”

I went to the Building Department and talked to the Chief Building Official.

The Chief frowned over the inspection notes and said, “The Inspector says here that the Family Room windows, light fixtures, and construction framing can’t possibly be over forty years old, which is the age it needs to be to qualify as ‘grandfathered in’; in other words, it wasn’t constructed before building permits were required, so it is illegal.”

The Chief told me that Jenny and Brad were required to submit a set of architectural plans and pay the fees to process the permit, but because Jenny and Brad didn’t cause the violation in the first place, the fees were less than they would be if the Family Room were being constructed new.

I hired an architect, we submitted the plans to the Building Department, and the Inspector came back for a one-time “Special Inspection”.

As it turned out, the Family Room was well-constructed and in compliance with Building Code, except for one thing: the walls were placed on the old original patio concrete slab with no perimeter foundation footings. The only solution was to dig trenches under the walls and pour a new concrete foundation two feet deep and one foot wide.

KDV stopped by the house and found me on my knees, shovel in hand, digging trenches.

“So you did sell your people a gold mine, babe,” he said “but you get to dig the shaft.”

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June 19, 2014

Pros

My fixer-upper buyers, Brad, Bob, and Bill crawled over, under, around and through a 1920’s “handyman’s dream,” a two-story house they were in the process of buying. Today was inspection day, and as fate would have it, the hottest day of the year.

I leaned against a side fence in the shade, perspiring and panting after helping Bill raise his extension ladder to the attic access door up in the gable end of the weathered old house.

A voice from behind me said, “I hope those boys know what they’re doin’ buyin’ that old piece of junk.”

With effort, I turned around, wiped the sweat from my eyes, and looked over the fence to see a large man wearing cut-off jeans, work boots and a Caterpillar cap.

“Oh, they know what they’re doing. These guys are pros,” I said.

“Then they’ll know better than to turn the power on before they .…“ Blam! An electrical explosion that sounded like a lightning strike came from the direction of the garage at the back of the property. “…check for rusted fuses and loose electrical wires.”

Sparks shot from a frayed old electrical wire draped across the metal garage roof.

Bob ran out the back door yelling “Kill the juice! Kill the juice!” Bill poked his head out the attic access door like a turtle, with pink bits of insulation stuck in his hair. Brad ran around yelling “Where’s the power box? Where’s the power box?”

The big man in the Caterpillar cap appeared on the scene, striding purposefully to the sidewall of the fixer-upper. He calmly found the power box, and killed the juice.

“Pros, huh?” he muttered.

Three hours later, inspection day was ending. Bob, Brad, and Bill staggered out of the house dirty, streaked with sweat, and overheated.

“One last thing,” said Bob. He turned on the swamp cooler mounted on the front wall of the house. It vibrated and squealed and tumbled off the front wall of the house like a dropped safe. Its waterline snapped creating a great fountain arching over the front yard, cascading down like a waterfall.

The big man in the Caterpillar cap appeared again, rolling by in his pickup truck just in time to see Bob, Brad, Bill, and me whooping and jumping about in the spray shooting from the wall of the house. The big man slowly shook his head.

If I read his lips right, he muttered, “Pros, huh?”

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May 1, 2014

Crawl of the Wild

“I’m a traveling library of smells,” says Jim, the Whole House Inspector. He raises his arms and scans himself as if taking inventory. He’s explaining why vicious dogs, nasty cats, and a variety of vermin seem to tolerate him, even like him. That’s a good thing, because Jim is a trespasser on the turf of dogs, cats, and vermin in the course of doing his job.

Jim has been inspecting homes since 1985. He has crawled over, under, around and through thousands of them. He’s been face-to-face with snarling, hissing, snapping creatures, in basements, attics, and yards. He’s emerged, so far, with no bites, scratches, nor stings.

He’s been scared just once.

Jim crawled in darkness, in the dirt beneath a vacant house in the foothills. He used his flashlight like a duster, wrapping up spider webs in front of his face as he wriggled on his belly. He snaked his way around to the back of the area, and on his return saw the silhouette of a dog lying in the dirt to the right of the access opening.

He called out. No response. He crawled a little closer, and said calmly, “I’m supposed to be here,” his standard offer of diplomacy to all creatures he encounters on the job. The dog didn’t flinch. Jim bounced a dirt clod near the head, and then bounced one off the flank. No movement. “That’s a fight or flight situation once I hit him, so I knew something wasn’t right,” says Jim. He fixed his flashlight beam on the body and squirmed closer. Jim’s scalp tightened when he realized he was inches from a mountain lion, not a dog.

“He was dead, but hadn’t been for long. He wasn’t stiff,” says Jim. “I had been there to inspect that house a week earlier, but the utilities were off, so I left. It turns out the Realtor put the cover on the access opening a few days before that, and must have sealed that lion in. It was a terrible tragedy. But if I had made the crawl the first time, that lion would probably have been alive, hungry, and mad……”

Jim shuddered. “That’s scary.”

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January 16, 2014

Draw the Line

A certain word associated with country property should never be forgotten. Hard lessons are learned when it is.

The lesson for me began with a phone message from my client, Jill:

“We have a problem. Would you give us a call, please?” Her voice was shaky. “Freddy won’t go away!”

Jill and her husband Jack closed escrow and moved into their new country home just a week prior. “Freddy” was the seller, Mr. Johnson, an old mountain man who didn’t say much. Jill dubbed him Freddy after a character in a horror movie. “He just creeps me out,” she would say. “He stares at us. And he wears that black felt hat and plaid jacket.”

I first met Freddy, that is, Mr. Johnson, at the side of the road. He held a rumbling chain saw, and stared at me. He made it clear I had inconvenienced him by interrupting his work.

“I’m looking for the owner of the property up the road, the two-story house with the pond in back,” I said.

He stared.

I explained I had buyers for country property and I was scouting for them. Did he know who owns the property?

“Yep.”

Did he know their name?

“Yep.”

Several ‘yep’s later, I determined he was, in fact, the owner in question. I eventually listed Mr. Johnson’s property, and Jill and Jack bought it.

I returned Jill’s call.

“Freddy’s up there right now,” she said. “At our pond!”

Forty minutes later, I stood next to Mr. Johnson.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” he said. The pond was the best feature of the property; clear, fresh, and private, surrounded by sycamores, maples and oaks.

As tactfully as I could, I told Mr. Johnson that Jill and Jack were uncomfortable with his unannounced visits. “It is their property now,” I said.

“Pond ain’t on the property,” he said, “this here’s BLM land.”

“But the fence line…….”

“Old cow fence,” he said.

I flinched and recalled a vision of my old mentor, KDV. “A certain word associated with country property should never be forgotten, babe,” he said. “Listen, bro, the only way country buyers will know what they’re buying, is if they get a………..”

“Survey,” I said out loud. “We should have gotten a survey!”

Mr. Johnson stared at me. “Yep.”

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December 17, 2013

Downtown

Secrets live in the basements and attics of old brick buildings in downtown Chico and Oroville. One man knows of a few, sealed off and abandoned in dark dusty rooms, untouched and unseen for decades. Jim, the Inspector, is hired by buyers of houses and buildings to check for problems with wires, pipes, wood, concrete; all things structural. He owns a reputation of thoroughness. Jim took to heart his mentor’s words: “People pay us to do this job. If we can get there, we go. It’s where we find the big stuff, where people don’t go.”

Jim finished inspecting the main floor and second story of an old downtown building, and asked the owner where he could find access to the basement. “We don’t have a basement,” said the owner. Jim knew better. He was sure the whole block stood over basement area. He went below adjoining buildings and found old openings into the basement in question, sealed shut with brick and concrete.

Jim patrolled the outside perimeter of the building, then searched the interior again, and found no sign or clue of any door, hatch, or secret panel. But it had to be there. Jim focused on a back room on the main level that had a section of floor covered with pre-war linoleum, a likely spot for an access door. Buried under that linoleum, perhaps? Jim told the owner of his hypothesis.

“Well, now I’m curious,” said the owner. He produced a flat-bar and hammer, and chipped up the old linoleum straightaway. There it was, a hinged square hatch-cover cut in to the thick sub-flooring. The hatch-cover lifted smoothly, exposing a narrow iron circular stairway spiraling into the darkness below. Jim descended, and came upon a half-circular bar and eight bar stools.

“It was as if they had just left,” said Jim, “I could picture the scene in my mind.” Women in flapper dresses and pearls, men in zoot suits and spats, laughing and drinking illegal booze in their private prohibition-era Speakeasy.

“Where is this treasure?” one might ask. Jim’s answer would be, “Somewhere beneath an old building in the Northern Sacramento Valley.”

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