What Questions Should I Ask My Home Inspector?

Somewhere along the way, the real estate and home inspection industry decided every home purchase needed the same warning label: “This is the biggest financial decision of your life.” I understand the impulse. It sounds serious. It sounds like someone cares. Mostly, it sounds like a sentence nobody bothered to think about before they said it.

Maybe it is the biggest financial decision of your life, and you’re genuinely sick with anxiety over it. Maybe this is your fifth house, and you’ve put a good chunk of your net worth into real estate because you’ve done the math and you like where it lands. Maybe it’s your third vacation home, and money was never really the question. Maybe you’re buying on behalf of an investment group, and it’s not even your money changing hands. I don’t know which one you are until you tell me. And frankly, I’d rather ask than assume. I respect my clients too much to project anything onto them.

So instead of assuming, I ask.

That’s really what this post is about. Not the questions you should ask me — although I’ll get to those, because they matter and you deserve real answers — but the questions I want to ask you, and why they change what I actually do on-site.

The Standard Questions (And Real Answers)

You’ll find plenty of lists online telling you to ask your inspector about licensing, years of experience, what’s included in the inspection versus what costs extra, and whether you can be there in person. Fair questions, and here’s where I stand on all of them: I’m InterNACHI-certified and licensed in both New Hampshire and Vermont. I come to this work after twenty-plus years running a general contracting business, which I still operate today — so what I know about how houses get built and how they fail isn’t secondhand or theoretical, and it isn’t frozen in whatever decade I got trained. A standard inspection covers the home’s major systems and structure; things like radon, water testing, wells, and septic systems are either add-ons or outside my scope entirely, and I’ll tell you plainly which is which rather than blur the line. You’re welcome to be present, and I’ll walk you through what I found once I’m finished, rather than narrating every step as I go — I do better work when I can move through the house with full attention, and you get a clearer picture from a proper walkthrough than a play-by-play.

That’s the baseline. Every client gets it, whether I know anything about you or not. But it’s not where the value stops — it’s where it starts.

The Question Most Buyers Don’t Know to Ask

The question most buyers don’t know to ask is this: do my plans for this house change what matters during the inspection?

Here’s the thing about a home inspection: it’s a snapshot. One house, one day, one set of eyes. What that snapshot is worth to you depends entirely on what you’re planning to do with the house afterward — and that’s information I don’t have unless you give it to me.

Let me show you what I mean.

Say a client — we’ll call her Judy — tells me this before the inspection: they need to move in quickly because their current home already has a closing scheduled. Both she and her husband work from home and need to dedicate a couple of rooms for offices, and they need them quiet, so they will keep doors closed against the dogs and the kids. They want fiber internet run into those rooms right away. In the next five years, her husband’s widowed mother will likely sell her own home and move in with them, and the plan is to convert the space above the three-car garage into an ADU. And if a work bonus comes through this year, heat pumps are on the table.

None of that changes whether I do a thorough inspection. I’m doing the full program either way, meeting or exceeding the Standards of Practice, regardless of what I know about you walking in. But knowing all that changes what stands out to me, how hard I lean on it in the report, and the conversation I have with you.

The move-in timeline means any safety issue becomes even more prominent — not because it wouldn’t matter otherwise, but because there’s not going to be much of a time buffer in getting issues addressed. The home office plan means I’m looking hard at an aging, single-thermostat heating system with no zone control, because closing those office doors is going to create hot rooms and cold rooms that the previous resident might have just lived with. The heat pump wishlist means I’m doing math on the electrical service — 100-amp panels with an electric water heater, dryer, and stove already on them don’t have room for heat pumps, even if the panel itself looks clean and modern. That’s a service upgrade conversation now, not a someday-maybe footnote. The fiber and dedicated-office wiring means I’m looking at outlets that were brought up to code with GFCIs — technically sufficient, sure — but flagging that this is the moment to run dedicated circuits and communications cable while the walls are already going to be open, instead of paying to open them twice.

And the ADU plan turns “inspect the garage” into something else entirely: whether the ceiling joists that were fine for parking cars under could handle a living space above them, how you’d isolate that space from the garage itself, whether the septic system has capacity for another bedroom, what site drainage looks like once there’s real disruption to the yard, and how an always-unheated structure holds up once it’s expected to stay warm. Some of that runs well past the edges of a standard home inspection, and that’s fine by me. I’m not going to sit on knowledge I have just because it falls outside a checklist. If I can hand you something useful, I will.

None of this happens if I don’t know what Judy’s planning. It’s the same house either way. It’s a very different report.

“Can I Do Some of This Work Myself?”

I love this question, and my answer is almost always yes. I’m a DIY guy through and through — game recognizes game. If you’re feeling a little too ambitious about a project, I’ll tell you honestly where I’d pump the brakes. If something looks intimidating but is genuinely within reach, I’ll tell you that too, and point you toward doing it safely. I’m not in the business of hedging every sentence and sending you to a specialist for things you’re capable of handling yourself. I’ll tell you when you actually need one — not before.

And if you have zero interest in swinging a hammer yourself or no time available to do it, that’s just as useful for me to know. Every repair on your list is real money out of your pocket, and that reshapes how I weigh certain findings for you compared to someone who’d rather do the work than pay for it.

How Long You’re Staying Matters, Too

If you tell me you’re planning to be in this house two or three years and then move on, that changes my emphasis as well. I’ll put more weight on flagging major systems that are late in their service life — because there’s a real chance you end up funding a roof, furnace, or water heater replacement you personally get very little use out of. My primary purpose is reporting accurate information so you can make the best decision for your needs. And context helps.

What This Actually Means for You

None of this is an upsell. I don’t do work on a property for a minimum of twelve months after any inspection I perform, on principle — so there’s no financial angle for me. The contracting side of the business is booked out a full year ahead at the time of this writing anyhow, and I’m turning away work. It’s just that a home inspection is more useful when it’s built around your actual plans instead of a generic checklist, and I’d rather ask a few good questions up front than hand you a report that treats a first-time starter home and a five-year ADU project the same way.

So before we even start the inspection, I’ll ask you some of what I’ve asked Judy here: how you intend to use the house, what you’re hoping to change about it, and what your timeline and budget realistically look like. You don’t need polished answers. “We don’t know yet” is a perfectly fine response. But the more you tell me, the more useful I can be — and that’s really the point of hiring an inspector who builds the things he’s now inspecting.

Austin Reida
Resonant Homes LLC — Home Inspections by a Builder Who’s Still Building
Licensed in NH & VT | InterNACHI Certified Professional Inspector

Questions, Answered