Most of what I’ve written on this site is about what I can do — how my building background shows up in an inspection, the things I catch that get missed, why the years I’ve spent running job sites give me a way of looking at a house that a checklist doesn’t. I stand behind all of it. But I want to spend some time on the other side of the ledger, because in some ways what I can’t do matters just as much, and you’re more likely to hear the truth about it from me than from most.
I learned this as a builder, long before I ever inspected a house. A big part of being good at this work is knowing what you don’t know. That sounds like a throwaway line, but I mean it plainly.
Out here in rural New Hampshire and Vermont, a person building or buying doesn’t have endless options. You might be choosing between me and two other guys. Maybe all three of us are sharp, maybe all three of us are fools, but that’s the list. Each of us has our strengths and our blind spots. The good builder knows both — he leans hard on what he can do with confidence, and he manages the rest carefully, which usually means knowing when to pick up the phone and bring in someone who knows more than he does about that one particular thing. The client, meanwhile, tends to treat you as the expert and the final word, whether you’ve actually earned that on the question in front of you or not.
So a lot of builders just plow ahead and do the best they can. And here’s something worth understanding: most of the mistakes I’ve seen in all my years around houses weren’t the work of crooks or lazy people. There are bad apples, sure, but they’re rare. Far more often, somebody just had the wrong information, or not enough of it. That’s how you end up with a beautiful finished product that’s missing one key piece, or has it put in wrong.
I’ll give you an example. You can build a gorgeous composite balcony off the second floor of a house — clean lines, nice railing, the whole thing — and get the flashing wrong where the ledger meets the wall. Now you’ve got water working its way into the two floors below, and nobody will know until it’s a real problem. The deck looks perfect. That’s the trouble with a finished surface: it tells you almost nothing about the decisions buried behind it.
The story behind a stain
Which brings me to the heart of what I want to say. A home inspection is a visual, non-destructive look at a house. I don’t open walls. I don’t pull siding or trim, lift finished flooring, or strip a roof to see what’s under it. I work with what I can see and safely reach the day I’m standing there. That isn’t a loophole in the fine print. It’s the entire nature of the job, and it means there is a great deal I will not see.
We have tools, and techniques, and judgment, and all of it helps us infer what might be going on where it isn’t obvious. But let me walk you through what’s actually behind something as ordinary as a water stain, because I think it makes the point better than any disclaimer.
For every stain you see on a finished surface, there was a long story before it. Say water found its way in — a small roof leak, or a pinhole in an old copper line. It ran down a framing member. At first the volume was small enough that the old rough-sawn framing just soaked it up and held it, especially through the summer, when that unconditioned space gets as hot as an oven. Then two things change. The leak gets a little bigger, and the wood reaches saturation. And water, once it can’t be absorbed anymore, does what water always does — it finds another way, with gravity as its co-pilot. Think of a river hitting a rock. It doesn’t argue. It just takes the next easiest way down.
So now the framing is soaked, and the water begins its relationship with the insulation. Insulation turns out to be a perfect bedfellow — it holds a tremendous amount of water, and as it nears saturation it starts wicking, pulling the water along by capillary action and distributing it beautifully. It’s only once the insulation is overwhelmed by the sheer volume that it finally shares the burden with the drywall. And that’s the moment an inspector finally gets to say, “hmm, looks like a little moisture here.”
By then, that stain is the last page of a story that’s been running for months, maybe years. I might read it correctly. I might catch it and tell you just what I think is happening back there. But I’m looking at the ending. The rest of the book is behind the drywall, and I don’t get to open the drywall.
Why I won’t hand you a repair price
This is also why I have a hard time with inspectors who hand buyers a confident repair number. I understand the impulse — you want a figure, because a figure feels like something solid to hold onto in a stressful, expensive moment. But I spent my career learning that you don’t know the real scope of a repair until you’re into it. Not until the drywall’s off, the plaster and lath are down, the subfloor’s exposed, the siding’s pulled, or you’ve started digging into that soft spot on the sill. On most older homes, I fully expect to uncover a half dozen more problems in the course of fixing the one we found. Anyone telling you a precise price from the finished side of a wall is guessing and calling it a quote. I’d rather give you the honest version: here’s what I found, here’s what I think it means, and here’s roughly what it’ll take to sort out once someone can actually get in there and see it.
Three days as a builder, five minutes as an inspector
There’s one more piece, and it’s the one I think about most.
As a builder doing highly custom work, I’m regularly handling a product for the first time. A client orders stainless steel exterior paneling from Sweden, and my crew spends three days figuring out how it goes on and three more installing it. Next time we’d probably do it in two — except there won’t be a next time, because nobody else around here is ever going to ask for it.
Now picture me inspecting three hundred houses in a year, and say twenty of them are custom homes like the ones I build. In any one of those, I might run into materials, methods, and configurations I’ve never laid eyes on before. Only now I don’t have three days to work it out. I’ve got about five minutes. I’ll do my best, and if there’s a resource I can tap right then to learn more about what I’m looking at, I’ll use it. But that isn’t always possible, and I’d be lying to you if I pretended otherwise.
Why I do it anyway
If all of this makes the work sound hard, that’s because it is, and it’s exactly why I love it.
I could have made more money years ago by picking one thing — roofing, say, or siding — and building a tidy, repeatable business around it. Lower overhead, systems dialed in, better pricing on materials, step back from the tools and manage the thing. The problem is I’d have hated every minute of it. What’s kept this work alive for me my whole life is that it never stops changing and it never stops teaching me. I might be working on a single estate for three years running — sitework, ponds, stonework, a house, a retreat cabin, matching woodwork from the 1790s with hand tools. The next year it’s two commercial jobs back to back. Some days I’m tearing my hair out over some wacky material a customer ordered from an island in the middle of the ocean I’ve never heard of, and honestly, I like that part too. The contrast is what keeps it vivid.
Home inspection turned out to be a natural next step on that same road. It taps everything I’ve spent my life learning, and it keeps handing me things I’ve never seen. There’s no training program on earth that actually prepares you for the range of what you’ll meet out there. Same as building, you’re the one on site, sometimes with no cell service, and you’ve got to figure it out. And people are looking at you as the expert, whether you deserve it or not.
I take that seriously. I will always do my utmost to live up to the trust a client puts in me, because that trust is an honor, and it’s the thing that makes the whole ride worth the price of admission.
But I’m not a wizard. And plenty of the spells cast by a house can defeat what magic I do possess.
If you are buying or selling in New Hampshire or Vermont and you’d like an inspector who’ll tell you the truth about what he can and can’t see, I’d be glad to talk it through. No pressure, no hard sell — just a straight conversation about the house and whether I’m the right fit for it.
Austin Reida – Resonant Homes