When purchasing a home, it is always recommended to perform a variety of inspections. The buyer can opt to perform a range of inspections to ensure they are well informed about what they are buying based on the condition of the home.

You can perform as many or as few inspections as you want. We have had buyers bring their construction buddy over to take a look at the home, or their handy parent. But the most common method is to hire a home inspector. These inspectors will go through the majority of the home, looking for flaws. Their purpose is to find defects, and believe me, they will! They will generate a report detailing what they find. This report is usually many pages, some reaching 20-40 pages or more.

The main reason for an inspection is to make sure there is a balance with how much you are offering on the home and what you are getting. It is to know the home's defects are accounted for within the price of the home itself.  So if there are a dozen of items to fix totaling $300, that may be just fine and you may expect that. But if the inspection turns up a $10,000 sewer line problem, you may have expected a properly working sewer line for the price you are paying for the house. This gives us the opportunity to renegotiate the price or ask for repairs so that the expectations of the house match the price you are paying for it. There is a minimum of when things shouldn’t be asked for by the buyer. This could be about 1% of the sale price. So on a $450,000 house, maybe try not to ask for any items under $4,500. In some cases, it’s fine to ask for lower priced items.

Besides the general inspection, you can also perform specialized inspections. We recommend also doing a sewer line inspection, and a fireplace chimney inspection, and other inspections as well, such as structural, or environmental hazard (radon, lead, arsenic, etc.) electric or plumbing separate from the general inspection.

Sewer lines can get very expensive to repair. We’re talking about $3000 for a very small repair, up to $18,000 for a sewer line replacement. The sewer inspection company will send a camera down the sewer stack v to look for problems. They’ll document what they find, and you can get bids from sewer repair contractors, if there are major problems found. Note that roots in the sewer line are common, and not necessarily an indicator of problems.

Fireplace chimneys are also an expensive repair if you are talking about buring wood. After talking with several fireplace chimney inspectors, they have found that there has only been 1 chimney that has passed out of about 6,000 chimneys. That doesn’t mean that the chimney can’t burn wood, just that it won’t pass the inspection. Some are obviously dangerous, but most of them aren’t. If you are planning on burning wood, this would be a good inspection to perform. Fixes range anywhere from $3000 to $7000 to $30,000. $7000 would be to install a gas unit in the existing fireplace and flue, while $30,000 would be rebuilding the chimney for burning wood. I