Posted on 10/24/2020 11:04:08 AM PDT by CaptainPhilFan
“Mr. mm, who does HVAC and consulting work, agrees with your estimate of about 30k.”
Sight unseen?
“per NEC 70 “
Per NFPA 70, National Electrical Code.
“Dude, you’re looking at 100k, easy. Unless you got that handy, walk away.”
LOL! You haven’t seen the house or inspection report! You have no idea.
You all cannot know how much I appreciate your kind, intelligent and very helpful answers to my current dilemna.
If the seller won’t renegotiate we walk and lose a little bit.
The house is discounted for the market, but not discounted for a house that needs everything redone. I forgot to mention windows.
I luv youze guyze. Seriously.
Send me your address and I’ll send you a Christmas Card :)
I have to finish reading and rereading all the terrific responses.
House inspections in central VA all have estimates for every item noted as needing repair.
Yours should have them. If not, inspector shafted you.
One of the reasons we read Free Republic for years - responses like this.
If you’re into this for ‘thousands’, then it’s worth a few hundred to consult with a real estate attorney, as you may have been defrauded:
If the electrical is two-wire and the new ‘covers’ were 3-prong outlets without grounds and were not GFCI, they violate NEC.
https://www.ajdanboise.com/blog/2017/september/why-two-prong-outlets-are-not-up-to-code/
That could be your needed poison pill to exit without loss (fraud, at a minimum imho, possibly specifically illegal in your state).
Frankly, my gut tells me $30-40 grand minimum for all the required upgrades.
“Frankly, my gut tells me $30-40 grand minimum for all the required upgrades.”
Upgrades are not required.
Nice to see someone caught that one.
“House inspections in central VA all have estimates for every item noted as needing repair.
Yours should have them. If not, inspector shafted you.”
I really doubt that!
Mike Holmes goes ahead and fixes the problems he finds that were missed by the initial inspector. . . And he and his production show pick up the cost of the remediation no matter what he finds. Some of the projects take months to fix and require gutting the houses and have included ones that were fully remodeled before they inspected them after the homeowners started experiencing problems.
“It’s an eye opener.”
Staged TV hype!
“Did your inspection test for asbestos? “
He is neither qualified nor allowed to perform asbestos testing.
“He does inspections that require breaking into walls through the Sheetrock, using infrared cameras, “
Actions that are absolutely prohibited for the general inspection.
“Mike Holmes goes ahead and fixes the problems he finds that were missed by the initial inspector. “
In Virginia, the inspector is prohibited from doing repairs or improvements within 12 months of the inspection date.
About the asbestos removal problem you encountered; we were lucky that it was just in the basement tile.
In talking about future plans to remove basement living area tile with the abatement company owner, he said that there was a high minimum cost associated with getting a team on site and set-up (trained team personnel, special air filtration equipment, draping, special suits and equipment, debris disposal at a certified landfill, etc.) and a minimum area charge and once that was done, there was not a lot of difference between the cost for a minimum job like the utility room and clearing out the entire basement. With all the minimums, I think we paid $1600-1700 for the utility room and I seem to recall he felt striping the entire basement to bare concrete would have been about $4,000 (The basement being probably 8-10 times the size of the utility room. These are 2019 prices.)
I should also note that, except for installed appliances like the furnace, hot water heater and washing machine and dryer, the utility room had to be cleared/stripped to the bare walls before the work could be scheduled. Of course, the need to clear out all the furnishings from the remainder of the basement is the primary reason why the final renovation work is not going to be done until we are getting ready to move out.
Walk away.
Big $$....what, at least 10K for a/c, alone?
Maybe they’ll give the house away...then you can reconsider.
Good luck!!
When I was first invited to visit the house for a dinner party. . . I stopped on the driveway in shock. I could see a distinct V droop in the ridge line that had a break in the middle and one that went down the roof in the middle. I went in and we had dinner and I called my buddy the doc over and asked him if he was aware his house had been moved. He was clueless. He and his wife thought the V dip in the roof gave the house “character.” They were calling it the “Valley House,” partly because of that “V”.
I told him that “V” meant the house showed every sign of having been sawed in half and moved in two pieces and then rejoined. It wasn’t in the real estate info, not in the house inspector’s report, nowhere, and that meant BIG problems. He got out the very thick inspection report which I took home and went through from front to back... and there were no comments on anything of the kind. Looking at the woodwork inside you could see where it had been cut and covered with a strip of matching wood, but not actually repaired or replaced. Plaster was cracking and starting to crumble everywhere. Door would not close and would start to open on their own in the middle of the night. They thought they had a friendly ghost.
I did some historic research online and discovered that the farmer who had owned the orchards 60 years or so before had moved the house a mile and a half from it’s original location when Hwy 99 was being converted to a four lane freeway! The original location was going to be taken up by an overpass. The state offered to buy it and was going to demolish it but would not pay to move it. The farmer sold the land under it, but was not letting the house go, so instead of selling the his family’s old homestead house with all of it’s memories to the state, the farmer decided to move it.
There were photos in the Stockton (California) Record and the Lodi News Sentinel of the halves of the house being moved at the time. The farmer and his workers and friends did the moving on their own. No experienced movers helped do it. They used farm and rented equipment.
The next weekend, I went out and found there WAS an under house crawl space access, right behind the A/C pad, a 3’ X 2” that opened easily. I crawled in and found that the house had no foundation at all! It was placed on PLOWED soil on mere concrete 12 X 12 piers put down on the unprepared soil. A newer section of the house had been added to the house on a slab, looked to me as if it had been a garage converted into a family room, but it was connected to the main house. Everything that was of the main house that was supported on post on piers was sinking into the ground, but not at the same rate. Some had sunk as much as six inches, some four inches, other much less. You could still see the remnant of furrows made by the last plowing. Some of the piers were canted at odd angles. I took photos with my digital camera of everything.
The previous owners had remodeled the kitchen with new cabinets and tiles which were coming loose and counters cracking as the house settled and there was a four to six inch drop in the second and third story floors where the joists had been cut with no attention to load bearing walls. Not in the inspectors report.
The upshot of the whole thing was they had to move out, the house had to be gutted, jacked up and a foundation poured under it, everything inside sistered where possible, or replaced where necessary to fix the sawn joists and beams, including the ridge beam, the roof pulled off, and replaced, plumbing, H/A ducting, new kitchen cabinets, counters, tile, etc electrical . . . Total cost over one half of the purchase price.
It was paid for by the inspector’s errors and omissions professional coverage insurance company. . . They kicked and screamed but wound up paying in the end. It helps when the doctor’s brother is an attorney.
Anyone, it seems can hang out their shingle and claim to be a “house or home inspector.” This inspector had just been a journeyman carpenter, had worked as a handyman, and had failed multiple attempts at getting a general contracting license before hanging out his inspector shingle.
The attorney brother got him on the fact that his “report” stated the entire house was built on a slab. . . But in another section he had written that he could not find the access to the crawl space (I had noticed that in my reading and highlighted it in my notes!). If it had a crawl space, how could it be built on a slab? It can be both, but it should be noted which part of the house is which. Sloppy work. His photo of the A/C compressor unit was taken from 50 feet away. If he had taken a closer photo (i.e. actually inspected the A/C unit), there’s no way he could have missed the large crawl space access. That photo proved he mostly did a very slapdash inspection.
The first words out of insurance company’s independent inspector’s mouth were an involuntary gasp and “Oh, my God! How could he have missed this house was moved!” Then he shut up. . . We got that on a video. LOL! He was very thorough. Proved very useful during arbitration.
The original inspector? He was fired by the company he was working for and became uninsurable, lost his bonding. They went out of business within a year; no one trusted their inspections after that debacle, even though they wanted a non-disclosure clause extended to protect them, the insurance company would not allow it. I think I posted about this on FR when this happened.
That’s my point. If the inspector can’t see it, he doesn’t know. He’s making assumptions. Sometimes a proper inspection means you open the sheet rock to look and see what’s actually in there. Has it really been brought up to code or was it give a spit and promise to look good for sale?
My mother hired a licensed electrician to rewire and bring one of her rentals up to code. It was a house she and my Dad had built with their own hands 60 years before and had been built to the code of the early 1950s. She was now in her early 90s and she paid this guy’s company $8,000 to do the job properly. He did not. He put in a new 100 Amp service, new receptacles, but left all the original wiring in place, hooking up everything to the old 15 Amp two-wire cloth-wrapped insulation (read deteriorated, fire-hazard) wiring.
The SOB installed a Decora switch in the bathroom and kitchen and told her they were state-or-the-art ground fault interrupters to “meet safety code near water”. . . And ran a new light above the vanity sink in the bathroom from the switch with ZIP cord wrongly polarized! Touch it while it was on and you could be shocked. Dare I mention it was not grounded?
Grounding, when he bothered, was hooked up to my dad’s separate ground wire that met code in the 1950s. but actually was now no longer connected to the plumbing inlet line because that had long ago burned away with a long forgotten short. I found it melted at the grounding clamp. Mostly he just did not bother.
Mom had specified in the contract extra circuits where an entertainment center would be located in the living room, so he just installed a three gang receptacle box and connected to the single multi-room 15 amp circuit that had the living room, dining room, and hallway, and one bedroom, and something else on it. She had specified extra circuits for the kitchen and an independent circuits each for the refrigerator and disposal. There were breakers labeled for those new circuits, but they were not hooked up to anything. No extra circuits at all. $8,000???? I don’t think so. It all looked good. He bilked her. He told her all the work was done under permit. Nope! But he billed her for a city permit.
Had there been a fire in that house from electrical cause, the insurance would have been null and void. Same if someone had been killed or injured due to electrical fault.
I found out about it all ten years later, after Mom passed away, and I was preparing the house for another tenant, doing a minor remodel and found the “ground fault interrupters” were not what she thought they were (she’d proudly told me about having it all upgraded and sent me a copy of the contract. It sure looked good, on paper. ).
The ONLY genuine thing they put in was the service panel. THAT was actually a good panel, but they grounded it with a #14 wire to a 2ft (two feet) piece of rebar shoved into the ground. THAT was discovered by my A/C guy installing a new A/C when the 220 had all kinds of problems. . . .
I wound up gutting the place and replacing everything, electrical (even that nice service panel because of adding the A/C), plumbing, kitchen, bathroom (that’s when we found the ZIP CORD (GRRRRR bastard could have killed someone in that bathroom!), gas lines, new appliances, except an antique gas stove, etc. Found 9x9 asbestos kitchen tiles (California regs, gotta go!) under 12 x 12 vinyl tiles... It turned out VERY expensive to bring it up to code.
I could not even go after the bastard legally because the business was now defunct and he’d died! I found his electrical company had made a business of defrauding older people in the same way for about a year or so before going under, although it once had had a good reputation.
I wondered where he got his electricians’ certification, and contractor’s License? A box of Crackerjacks? My mom was no fool, he had all the correct paperwork and contractor’s number, etc. But I later came to suspect after research the guy she hooked up with was using stolen IDs of someone who had been legit... or it was a relative using the legit guy’s tickets after the guy died or was incapacitated to milk the company for all it’s worth while they can. I’ve heard of that happening. I do know the guy whose name was on the very professional receipts died about the same time as the work was done for my mother and the company’s reputation declined rapidly after that with lots of BBB complaints before being shut down.
“Sometimes a proper inspection means you open the sheet rock to look and see what’s actually in there. Has it really been brought up to code or was it give a spit and promise to look good for sale?”
Mostly inspectors cannot cause damage in their inspection nor do they comment in code.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.