I spent over 20 years building homes in NH. Now I inspect them.

Why My Background Makes Me More Useful as a Home Inspector

I owned and ran a general contracting business for more than two decades, and that business is still active today. That’s not a background detail — it’s the thing that makes the inspection different.

It means I’ve written the bids, hired and overseen the other trades, done the physical work, dealt with building officials, and stood behind the results. And because the business is still running, what I know about materials, methods, and how buildings behave isn’t frozen in the past.

Here’s why that matters in a house. Buildings rarely hand you a problem in isolation. A wet cellar frequently starts with the grading outside. A crack is either meaningless shrinkage or one piece of a larger pattern, and knowing which requires understanding what the building was doing before it appeared. I spent my career on the other side of that work — opening buildings up, repairing what failed, and finding out which repairs last.

I also don’t perform contracting work on homes I inspect for at least 12 months after the inspection. No repair pitch, no conflict of interest, and no reason to shade a finding in either direction.

Two Licensed Inspectors, One Appointment

Most of our inspections are done by two licensed inspectors. My wife and business partner Kayla has been building alongside me full time for years and is now licensed in her own right, and she’s on most jobs with me. The synergy of two inspectors with two sets of eyes and two perspectives brings tremendous benefit to every inspection we do together.

Every house is different, sometimes wildly so. A small ranch and a village house that’s been updated by five owners are not the same job, and neither one tells you much about the next place down the road. What stays constant is the patience available. Past a certain point, everybody standing around a house starts wondering when the inspector will be done, and a solo inspector who walks into a property needing more time than that has two options: run long, or quietly stop looking at things.

Two of us covers roughly twice the ground in the same appointment. The house gets the attention it actually needs, and nobody’s afternoon gets wrecked.

The One Person in the Deal Who Works Only for You

It’s worth looking at how a real estate transaction is arranged. Your agent is paid when the sale closes. Your lender is paid when the loan funds. The contractor writing your repair estimate has an interest in the size of the repair. None of that makes those people dishonest — most will deal with you straight — but nearly everyone involved does better when the deal goes through.

The inspector is the exception.

My fee is the same whether you buy the house or walk away from it. I have nothing to sell you afterward and no stake in which way you decide. What I owe you is a hard look at the building and an honest account of it in writing.

Inspecting Homes in Marlborough

Marlborough sits where Route 101 meets Route 124, with Keene a few miles west and Peterborough out to the east. Plenty of traffic passes through, but the village is a real one — Main Street, older houses, the Frost Free Library built partly out of granite that came out of the ground right here.

That granite is worth knowing about, and not for scenic reasons. The town quarried it, sent a good deal of it to Boston and Worcester, and kept the rest, which is now holding up foundations, edging walks, and sitting about four inches under wherever you were hoping to dig. It’s also the same bedrock that gives this part of the state its radon.

The houses fall into two rough groups. In and just off the village, most of what sells is old, and has been through enough owners to show it — updated, re-updated, and repaired by whoever was available at the time. Out on the rural roads toward Troy, Harrisville, and Dublin, you’re looking at farmhouses on acreage, older capes and colonials, some postwar ranches, and properties where the barn has usually been standing as long as the house and has usually been asked about half as often. Once you’re off the main road, private wells and septic systems are the rule.

What matters for an inspection isn’t which group a property falls into. It’s how many hands have been on the building and whether the work fits together.

What I Look For in a Marlborough Inspection

Electrical, which is often the busiest system in the house. Panels, service, grounding, visible wiring, outlets, and fixtures. In village properties especially, wiring tends to have been added a circuit at a time across many decades — older panel types, fuse boxes carrying more than they were built for, knob-and-tube that’s been extended, and abandoned runs left in place when the service was upgraded. I sort out what’s unsafe, what an electrician should look at, and what’s simply old and working.

Foundations and structure. Fieldstone, brick, block, and poured concrete, sometimes more than one under a single building. Settlement and movement, mortar joint deterioration, water entry, and the condition of sills, posts, and beams where wood meets masonry — which is where old houses usually fail first. Where additions meet the original structure, that junction earns extra attention.

Water, from the roof to the ground. Roof coverings, flashing, valleys, chimneys, gutters, grading, and where water goes after it lands. Then cellars and crawlspaces: staining, efflorescence, rot, sump systems, and the signs that water has come in more than once. A stone foundation can be damp seasonally and still perform, which is a different matter from a finished basement hiding a foundation that was never meant to stay dry.

Heat. Boilers, furnaces, heat pumps, mini-splits, and the wood stoves backing a lot of them up. Older oil-fired equipment and cast iron radiation are common around here and can have plenty of life left, or not — age matters less than how the system has been used and maintained. Buried and abandoned oil tanks are worth asking about, and I’ll tell you when something warrants that question.

Chimneys and flues. Clearances, hearth protection, connectors, and whatever is visible of the liner. Where a chimney has been repurposed or an installation looks improvised, I’ll recommend a chimney professional and say why.

Plumbing. Supply, drains, water heating, fixtures, and visible leaks, plus where the pipes run, whether they’re protected from freezing, and what the different eras of pipe add up to.

Attics, insulation, and ventilation. Insulation coverage, air sealing, bath and kitchen venting, soffit and ridge ventilation, and any staining, frost, or rot on the underside of the sheathing. Houses that were tightened up over the years sometimes solved a heating bill and created a moisture problem, and the attic is usually where that shows.

The exterior and the site. Siding, trim, windows, doors, porches, decks, stairs, railings, grading, and drainage across the lot. On rural properties, driveways, culverts, and where water runs during a heavy rain are part of how the building performs.

Barns, garages, and outbuildings. These are quoted separately from the home inspection, so tell me what’s on the property and I’ll give you a straight number. On larger parcels they’re often the buildings with the most expensive surprises in them.

Who Is Buying in Marlborough

For buyers. A lot of people who end up here started out looking at the whole Monadnock Region without a specific address in mind. Whatever brought you, an older house is the clearest case for a careful inspection — the village character is real, and it comes with maintenance histories that deserve to be understood rather than assumed. I’ll ask you to join us near the end for the walkthrough, where we can stand in front of the actual foundation, boiler, panel, or repair and talk about what it means. Afterward you get a detailed digital report with photographs and written explanations of what we found, and if you can’t be there, the report stands on its own and I’m glad to go through it by phone.

For sellers. A pre-listing inspection lets you find out what a buyer’s inspector will find while you still control what happens next. Repair it, service it, document it, disclose it, or price with clear information — all better than finding out mid-negotiation with fewer options and less time.

For investors. Older in-town properties can look like straightforward renovation candidates right up until the systems tell a different story. I focus on the major systems, structure, moisture, safety and insurability conditions, and the work that’s been put off long enough to become a capital item. I won’t produce a renovation budget from a visual inspection, but twenty years of running construction gives me a useful sense of what’s a nuisance and what changes your plans.

For realtors. The inspection support page for agents covers scheduling, turnaround, communication, and what my reports look like inside a transaction.

A Practical Inspection Report

You’ll have the report within 24 hours of the inspection, with photographs, clear explanations, and findings organized so you can tell what’s significant from what’s routine.

Safety issues and major defects get direct attention. When something needs a specialist — a structural engineer, an electrician, a chimney professional, an HVAC contractor, someone to look at an old oil tank — we say so, and we say why.

The report is written to still be useful after the appointment is over. You should be able to hand a finding to a contractor, bring it into a negotiation, or come back to it months later and still understand what we saw and why it mattered.

Schedule Your Marlborough Home Inspection

If you’re buying, selling, or assessing a property in Marlborough or the surrounding area, I’d be glad to help you understand what you’re looking at before you move forward. Call or text to find out what scheduling looks like, or use the online scheduling tool.

Call or text: (802) 289-0025
Email: connect@resonanthomesnh.com

FAQ: Home Inspections in Marlborough, NH