Inspection Day!

Nothing reaffirms your decision to put an offer on a house more than having a trained professional spend three hours in your potential future home, picking apart all of its defects.

We had an inspector...inspect (what else do they do?) the house last Thursday. For a 34-year-old house, everything went according to our expectations. There were some creaking stairs (go figure), and the house was also missing some GFCI outlets, sealant (around windows and bathtubs), and surprisingly, most of their doorknobs? It is baffling the things you miss the first time walking through a property.

While there was some evidence of past leaking in the basement, it was clear they had put in a sump pump long after the house was built. This was a little scary because we knew that the house had leaking problems in the past, but also encouraging that the leaking had stopped because of the actions the previous homeowners had taken.

But the biggest, most intimidating problem that the inspector found was that the boiler is 17 years old with an estimated life of 20 years. That is not that big of a deal, we hear, because boilers last far longer than furnaces if you give them a little TLC. But this boiler hadn't been serviced since 2004! There was corrosion around the joints, which is evidence that there is a leak somewhere along the way.

Yes. We could replace the boiler...if we won the lottery. Apparently these things run upwards of $5,000 to replace, and after putting a down payment on the house, we will be pretty much tapped out as far as major purchases go.

So we sent the sellers an amendment to our offer, adding the condition that the boiler must be serviced by a certified HVAC specialist, repaired/replaced if necessary, and that the sellers must provide us a report/receipt from the HVAC specialist. We were under the impression that they HAD to fix the boiler because it was a major defect in the house, and that if they rejected our amendment, we could walk. The sellers had until 9 am on Sunday to respond to our amendment. By about 1 pm on Sunday, we still hadn't heard anything. Things were looking pretty grim. While we convinced ourselves we were comfortable with walking away from that house (no air conditioning!), we didn't want to. We had already put so much time, energy, and emotion into this house, and we didn't want to start all over.

After a couple calls from our real estate agent, however, it came out that because the boiler wasn't specifically listed in a "major defect" section in the inspector's report, the sellers did not have to abide by our amendment. In that case, we would have to replace the boiler ourselves if necessary, and we couldn't just walk away from the deal. $5,000?! That's a pretty scary number.

But that loophole we weren't aware of flew over the sellers' heads too. Luckily, I received an email from Judy (our realtor) at 6 am this morning (Monday). Both sellers had agreed to and signed our amendment. Looks like May 12 is actually happening! So I celebrated by buying this chair. :)

So the moral of the story is: Make sure the inspector lists the major defects in the major defects section of the report! Do it!
Also: Don't go to Steinhafels on a beautiful Sunday afternoon looking for "design ideas" and let your fiance walk out with a brand new piece of furniture. Don't do it!