By home inspectors for home inspectors

Let me start by saying, “I love houses!” I have always loved houses! Even going way back to when I was a kid growing up in the Valley on the south edge of Syracuse! I have a distinct memory of my 9-year-old self saying to my father, “Dad, we have a really nice house!! (What 9-year-old gives a crap about their house?? Well…I did!)  “It has 3 bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom.”, I chimed eagerly! (He was probably thinking, “What a weirdo my third-born is! No wonder he’s always getting beat up.”) Forgotten in my description was the newly finished basement installed by my father and grandfather in ‘66 that boasted a game room, another bedroom, and a bathroom. This space was created to house my two older brothers and was assembled on the fly to yield more space for our growing family; namely, the upcoming addition of my youngest brother, who was slated to make the scene later that year.  His arrival brought our family headcount up to seven. 

To be clear, the “nice house” I grew up in was a typical 900 ft² ranch located amongst a hundred or so similar 900 ft² ranches. Our neighborhood was built during the time-period where comparable housing developments with modest homes were being constructed throughout the US. These were mostly filled with WWII and Korean Conflict veterans and their families, taking advantage of the low-interest loans available from the recently enacted “Serviceman’s Readjustment Act”, more commonly known as the “GI Bill”. 

Credit for the origin of the “housing tract” goes to a gentleman named William “Bill” Levitt, a WWII veteran himself, having served with the Navy Seabees. He, along with his brother Albert, developed the process for this construction method in the 40s shortly after the war. They cloned a method devised by Henry Ford in 1913 that we know of as the “assembly line”. Only Ol’ Bill wasn’t sending houses down a line to be created! He was instead moving teams of workers down the road from lot to lot, each team performing their assigned task until low and behold, this monumental undertaking atop an empty expanse of turf formally known as “Island Trees” was miraculously transformed into a neighborhood! “Levittown” was the title bestowed upon this unincorporated community located out on Long Island. 

Thereafter, using the same methods, many neighborhoods comparable to Levittown sprung up around the country. One of those neighborhoods was where my family roots were planted here in Central New York! And if you look back through the history of your town, I’ll bet there are a slew of these types of housing tracts around you too! And one thing they each had in common…they were teeming with kids…hundreds of them! The Boomers had landed; all seventy-six million of them, born between 1946-64! Schools were built and packed full, playgrounds were constructed, Little League and Pop Warner associations magically appeared. Sidewalks were filled with Stingray bikes, striped bell-bottoms, and the echoes of adolescence, where we played "Kick-the-Can" and "Red light, Green light" and were instructed to go home when the streetlights came on! Through the eyes of youth, it was a magical time! 

As home inspectors, we get to touch this wonderful history and know these neighborhoods intimately! I’ve focused back to this timeline to remind you that every house you pull up in front of; every entry door you stand before and ring the bell, every furnace, every electrical panel, every toilet you flush in every one of the houses that you inspect…those houses, they are a part of history, each one having its own story! 

When we step inside a house built in 1910, from our backdrop as home inspectors, we generally sense that we are getting ready to inspect an older home, and that’s an accurate observation. And if we’ve been doing this for more than a minute, we enter with a pretty good idea of what we’re up against. 

But it’s also relative. Older houses, we’ve learned through experience, have creaks and groans and sags that are much less concerning than if we were to come across the same condition in, say, a house built in 2015. The caveat is, it’s not that those creaks and groans don’t matter, they may or may not mean something concerning, and it's our job to figure that out. This is why older buildings need a heightened degree of knowledge on how they were put together so we can properly diagnose them. That’s right, diagnose! Part of our job includes acting as a diagnostician! The burden of all home inspectors involves analyzing, evaluating, and using critical thinking. Other elements of our calling include observing, reporting, and guiding!  That’s right, guiding our clients! Not to guide them whether or not to buy the house (that’s their dealio), but to present them with all the necessary information so they can utilize good judgment while they are teeing up to spend an enormous amount of dough! Those skills, and the ability to properly exercise them, make up the crux of our job, and that job is an important one which cannot be overemphasized!

But we must also remember there was a time not that many generations passed when a family walked through that very same doorway of that 1910 structure for the first time using their shiny new key to “come home”. They experienced the smells that emanated from the recent construction as they wandered through the rooms of their newly acquired dwelling! This became their “new house” where they were to build a lifetime worth of memories with their family! And there you stand…on the same footprints where likely hundreds have stood before you; stood there during good days, bad days, birthdays and holiday celebrations, the handing off of report cards, first dates, graduations, and so many more of life's experiences. Some may have also stood there on those same footprints for the last time before going off to war; too many that never got to return to that doorway they dreamed of while in the midst of their fear and misery. If only houses could talk! Oh, the stories they could tell! 

Yes, as home inspectors, we understand that we must be the non-emotional component of a real estate transaction and visually dissect a house to discover all of its hidden sins. But we also need to be mindful to pay homage to its history. Home inspectors: know your job, do your job, stay in your lane, and don’t be influenced by others who have a vested interest in the transaction, be it a seller, a real estate agent, or even your client. Nobody said that part was going to be easy, and to be sure, a fair amount of background noise needs to be ignored to succeed in this line of work. But at the same time, respect the history; that’s right, respect the history that every one of us will one day become a part of. 

Stay safe!