Yeah... I know, I haven't gotten back to the Moore wedding. I'm really not sure how to write significant pieces of it in order to keep it meaningful and accurate while at the same time refraining from over-editorializing and potentially writing things that I might not want to have published to the open Internet. Bear with me.
So Anna and I are buying a house. And part of buying a house is having a home inspection. So I went on my home inspection with the local Crazy Jamaican Home Inspector. I definitely recommend the guy so long as you don't mind that he's not really big on punctuality. He's very thorough, but very stereotypically Jamaican with respect to punctuality and attention to things like dates and times.
Anyways, we found a couple of issues with the house... nothing deal-breaking, but it turns out that the owner before the current owners was something of an aspiring home handy-man. Except that he sucked at installing toilets, electrical outlets and REALLY sucked at installing dishwashers and soldering copper piping.
The Toilet - When you grab it and try to swing it back and forth, there's about an inch that it comes up off of the ground and probably 45 degrees of motion from one extreme to the other. Oh... and it leaks to the basement. Fortunately, it leaks onto replaceable drop ceiling tiles... but it's still a problem.
The Electrical Outlets - He failed to ground any of the outlets that he installed in the garage.
Copper Piping - So when soldering the copper piping above the hot water heater, he failed. There are probably half a dozen pinhole leaks that have led to a bed of copper oxide roughly half an inch high on top of the hot water heater.
The Dishwasher - The capstone of the whole experience. So when he installed the dishwasher, he apparently noted a lack of electrical service under the counter. No matter, there are outlets on top of the counter. So what did he do? He drilled a tiny hole, cut off the end of the plug, fished the cable through, spliced the end back on and attached it to the wall. Except, apparently he also sucks as splicing, because the plug has since melted to the point where there is significant copper exposure. Seriously, I'm surprised nothing's caught fire yet.
All in all, I'm very grateful for the home inspector, because while there's a lot of things that I caught on my own, there's a much longer list of little things and significant but subtle things that I would have never noticed. And if anyone's buying in Cedar Rapids, talk to me... The Crazy Jamaican is sure to drive your Realtor nuts, but he's damned good at what he does.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at July 31, 2008 10:17 PM | TrackBack