“You really like old stuff, don’t you?” my wife interrupted, as I rambled on in my typical annoying manner. I was in the middle of explaining, for the 40th time I’m sure, how much I loved 1800’s-era houses, and slate roofs….and discovering an incinerator in an old house, and stone foundations, and old boilers, especially steam boilers! I’m mesmerized when I come across “flying splices” in Knob & Tube wiring, wondering what kind of day the electrician who made that splice so long ago was having. And I’m infatuated with the smell of an old attic! Coming across signs of indoor plumbing having been installed into an existing building fascinates me to no end! Yeah, I guess she’s right! I do like old stuff. And the history that goes with it!
You see, I’m a home inspector. My occupation is to go through buildings and find “conditions”. I’ve heard people opine many times over the years that my job is to find things wrong with houses, but nope! It’s to find “conditions”. That’s it. Conditions!
“Is it right? Great, let’s move on!”
“Is it wrong? What level of wrong is it?”
“Is it “Abandon ship” wrong? Or is it “Easy-to-fix” wrong?”
“Or somewhere in between?”
“And what is my client to do with this information?”
That’s the job of a home inspector in a nutshell. Find, explain and advise.
I came to this career as a young man of 39, having worked in the construction field for most of my previous adult life. The year was 1998. I remember walking into my first inspection, carrying with me a bag full of tools, (several of which I wasn’t sure what to do with yet), a couple weeks of rudimentary home inspection training, and the well-disguised knowledge that I had only a vague idea what I was supposed to do. This was a time well before licensing in NY, and though I didn’t know it yet, as minimal as it seemed, my couple weeks of training exceeded what most of the working inspectors in the field had. But they were “doing it!” So why couldn’t I?
It somewhat surprised me to find that there was actually a group of local home inspectors that met every month at a restaurant and ran both formal and informal training exercises. It mostly surprised me, as I hadn’t even known home inspection was a real profession until a few months prior. Honestly! Who on earth would pay someone to tell them about their house?? Yet here was this group...that had a Board and a President and a Treasurer! And of course, an Education committee! As I walked into my first meeting, I quickly realized that I held the title of the “dumbest man in the room”. But I was smart enough to realize that if I had any chance of figuring this all out, I was in the right room! I quickly joined the Education Committee, after acknowledging to then-President Gregg Harwood that I was going to be more on the “receiving” than the “giving” end where education was concerned. “That’s OK, there’s always something to be done”, he replied, I’m sure just happy to have someone else on board to help pick up the slack.
That was over 27 years ago and what a whirlwind it has been! For 15 of those years, I labored on that Education Committee, knowing that the closer I was to the information and knowledge, the better I would be at digesting it, making me a more complete inspector. And I learned, and I continued to learn. And I continue to learn today! That group where I learned so much has faded into a wistful hazy memory. It would be impossible to aptly give credit to those who have helped educate me through all those years. I so wish I could go back and thank them all! This has always been about knowledge. Never has it been about flashy marketing schemes, clever slogans or limiting myself to the number of credits needed to keep a license! Knowledge! It’s the knowledge, folks! That never has changed, and it never will in our industry! The rest is just window dressing!
Yeah, I like old stuff! And the history that goes with it!