HOME INSPECTION, PART ONE

I took off for the afternoon and Tripper took care of the inspector guy. He called me about two hours in and said there wasn’t anything big to worry about, but that the guy was going to be there about an hour longer than expected.

When I got home, it was dark. Patricia and Lauren were off at a Girl Scout function[1] and I had the boy with me. I took a look through the house and you could tell things had been moved. Tripper called me as I walked through the house to make sure everything looked okay. He told me that he had to wait for the final report, but that nothing looked too bad and he’s be over later when they delivered the report to him.

It was after five and I had to get dinner started. Connor was working on his homework. I turned on the lights in the backyard and noticed that the faucet was dripping.

There were two faucets in the backyard – which seemed excessive for such a small house. One was over in a corner by the kitchen and was not only a faucet, but had, for a while, contained the pressure relief for the house. One side was a regular garden faucet. The other side was a red plastic hand that if you turned it, all the water for the house funneled through. Or at least that’s what a plumber told me. It was one of those things that didn’t make much sense to someone who writes and makes TV for a living.

“Well, you know that’s the pressure relief for the whole house, don’t you?”

“Really? And can we switch to camera three?”

You see, there is a failure to connect at a deeper level.

We’d had to have that and one of the sprinkler valves replaced the previous January. It was Sunday and I had gotten up too late to go to church. Patricia and the kids had gone and I was walking through the living room to get more coffee when I saw and heard one of the sprinklers thump on. It was the middle one in the back yard and you could see it from the big window as it moved back and forth and back and forth.

Then about an hour later, as I was reading the paper[2], I realized that it was still running.

When it was usually set for 15 minutes.

And, oh, yeah, it was a Sunday and they weren’t set to go off on Sunday.

Curious, I walked out back and saw that the top had blown off the faucet and it was spewing water into the air[3].

I called a plumber. It seemed reasonable.

It took him a while to get there. It had been a record cold in the San Fernando Valley the night before. It had gone below freezing before and in December the field across the street was often covered in frost[4]. But this night it had not only gone below freezing, but had done it for hours and the pipes for the in-lawn sprinkler system had frozen and burst. Why it burst with one fountain and one sprinkler going off, I don’t know. But it had.

The other faucet ran out of the house behind the bathroom and was the one we most often had the hose hooked up to.

As I walked by the door on this evening, I looked out and saw that it was dripping and there was something black on it.

I went out to check. It was very weird. It looked like there was electrical tape on it. I reached out to turn it off, took the handle and it flew off as water shot out of the pipe which remained in the house.

Boy, was I pissed.

I went inside, called a plumber and then immediately called Tripper.

“Their inspector busted a pipe,” I said.

“What?”

“He busted the pipe that connects to the faucet in the back of the house.”

“I’ll call and Ill be right over. I’m going to pick up the report.”

Tripper sounded angry.

“They’re responsible for any damage their inspector does, you know,” he told me.

Well, I didn’t “know”, but I had suspected.

Tripper showed up while the plumber, who had come after I’d called four others, was busy at work welding in the back yard. Nothing like having a talk in the light of a Welding arc flash.

Tripper, resplendent in jeans and a sport coat[5] showed up with the report.

“I called the realtor and she put me on with her and the inspector and he said it was already broken.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “We live here and I would have…”

Tripper put his hand up.

“They said it was on the other inspection. The one you had done.”

“If it was, I would have…”

“Shaun, this is about selling the house.”

“But…”

“You don’t want to piss off the buyer and the buyer’s agent. Just pay for the faucet and be done with it.”

I looked at him.

He looked at me without even a trace of a smile. Dead serious.

I knew how serious it was. He hadn’t said “Right?” once.

But right he was. We were making a decent profit. We had four offers and one serious as a heart attack buyer who showed no signs of backing off. I should just take it, pay the couple of hundred bucks for the repair and be grateful.

I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t easy.

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

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[1] Lauren was the scout, but don’t think Patricia isn’t capable of scouting!

[2] The funnies.

[3] Which is something you’d think you’d notice.

[4] Once it was covered in frost on Christmas morning – which was really cool.

[5] Tripper bought the kind of jeans that might as well have been worsted wool. These were the kind of jeans you could only get at places that called themselves a “men’s shop” and not the sort of thing you’d find at a mall. It may have been that he secreted starch where other men perspire.