Home Inspection, Part Two
Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew.
We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal.
We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see how you could get much in there.
He found two leaks in the plumbing under the house, both near the washer/dryer in the kitchen and he said those were attracting termites to the old wood and cardboard stored in there.
Tripper looked at me.
“You know,” he said, “the stuff you have down there.”
“I don’t have shit down there,” I told him. “You couldn’t pay me to crawl around under there.”
“Oh.”
He looked like he didn’t believe me. I didn’t care. I just cared that this mean I needed a plumber AND an exterminator.
Visions of dollar bills with wings on them, all of them flying away, filled my head.
We’d had to have the place fumigated for termites when we’d bought it. It was on the borderline of just shooting them with some kind of electric gun[1] and tenting the whole house. I was kind of excited when it came to tenting. You have to understand that coming from Western New York, “tenting” was something you did on a camping trip, or, if you were ambitious, at a circus. When I’d first moved to California, I’d seen houses completely covered in what looked like canvas for days on end and finally figured out it was for cockroaches or termites[2]. When I was getting the house ready for sale, I found a couple of the sings they’d posted around saying, basically, “This house has been filled with really dangerous shit and we think we got it all out.”[3]
This time the only problem was some termites under the washer and they could be taken care of with some liquid. Or some powder. Or their mothers would be threatened. Something like that. No biggie.[4]
There was some dry rot – we knew that. Once again, I’d not heard of it in New York, but I guess that may have been because I wasn’t’ paying attention. Dry rot was as much a part of life in SoCal as sunscreen. We’d had some taken care of, but there was some more the inspector found.
The roof we knew had been re-roofed and would need a new roof in a few years. We knew that.
The air conditioner/heater was exactly what we knew it to be. Damn thing never broke when we had a home warranty.
But there was one thing…
A beam in the garage ---- THAT WAS ABOUT TO FALL!
OH.
MY.
GOD!
Danger! Danger!
“What?” I said.
“Yeah. She called me really concerned about this. Right? She said there’s a beam in the garage that’s cracked, part of the frame. And there’s stuff stored up there and that there shouldn’t be stuff stored up there because it’s putting a strain on the frame and that’s probably why it cracked.”
I just stared at him. I was hearing what he was saying, but it wasn’t making much sense.
“Do you know what they’re talking about?” He asked.
“Yes.”
“She’s really worried about it.”
“She’s nuts.”
“I don’t know. She thinks…”
“Tripper, that’s been like that since we bought the house.”
“Well, do you have a lot of stuff stored up there?”
“There’s stuff that’s been up there since the original owner. There’s scraps from this carpet,” I said, pointing at the floor. “There are the original interior doors and the doors that originally went on the kid’s closets. From BEFORE we owned the house, in case you think I’d pick out that horrible faux wood door. There’s a brass bed frame. When we moved in there was a ton of stuff in the garage. When we bought it, it got left. There was a cheap black lacquer vanity. There were old family pictures of a 1964 T-bird and someone we had no idea who it was. But the pictures were cool, so we kept those. There was also a torah and Tefillin in there.”
“What?”
“A torah and tefillin. Do you know what those are?”
“I’m Jewish.”
“You could be Reform.”
This didn’t get him to crack a smile.
[1] Which seemed very “Captain Video” to me.
[2] I guess I may have seen buildings in Manhattan tented when I was living there, but I was drinking a lot and it was the heyday of performance art. I may have just thought it was Cristo’s house.
[3] Liability insurance. What can I tell you?
[4] More dollars flying away, though.
Entire contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin
Comments