Yes, this potato is being used as a cap for an active gas line.

March 7, 2010 9:59 AM

Home Inspection Nightmares, editions III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX. From the good folks at This Old House & The ASHI Reporter. (Previously, I & II)
posted by R. Mutt (40 comments total)

My friends and I have probably rented in half of those buildings in our twenties. Especially the ones that combine plumbing and electric mains in unusual ways.
posted by ardgedee at 10:06 AM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I wonder how many of these were based on AskMe answers.
posted by TedW at 10:09 AM on March 7, 2010 [9 favorites]

My own house has some issues that were missed by our house inspector (and that really pisses me off, since he out-and-out lied about some of it).

The water softener is plugged into a mechanic's trouble light that is wired somewhere in the crawlspace. The damper on the wood/oil furnace is completely rusted shut. They built the deck of standard plywood, laid over a sheet of plastic, so that water accumulates and rots the wood. the ducting had holes up to 8 inches across. The wiring in the crawlspace is hanging down in random loops, often wrapped around the water pipes.

This is our first house. We foolishly though we could trust a house inspection. I asked him "Is there anything here which should dissuade us from buying?" and he responded with a resolute "No!".

So, I've been fixing up as time and money allows, but that's going to take us a decade and I bet if we sold we'd be lucky to break even. Really, there oughta be a law.
posted by swimming naked when the tide goes out at 10:22 AM on March 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

For people who are slow like me: click the little orange arrows to see many pictures at each one of those links.
posted by agentofselection at 10:25 AM on March 7, 2010

It's hard to imagine this electrical panel in the shower is for real.
posted by Nelson at 10:31 AM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I am amazed this isn't a repost. This series has been around for a good long time and still never fails to entertain/astonish. Thanks!
posted by Thorzdad at 10:47 AM on March 7, 2010

I'm pretty sure individual series were posted previously, but a lot of these are new.
posted by Decimask at 10:48 AM on March 7, 2010

Yeah, this series has been around for a long time and it's pretty hysterical (shocking?). You would be amazed, though, at how many people:

a) do not have a home inspection when buying a home, and
b) do not have an inspector review work done to a home.

As for the "there should be a law" - I agree. In a classic example of "if I knew then what I knew now", the company that did the inspection of my home when I bought it missed several obvious flaws and seriously downplayed other issues that should have been red flags to re-negotiate. But then again, when the inspector is hired by the real estate company...what do you expect? Lesson learned, and I've taught myself a wide variety of skills in the interim.

So, note to anyone out there in the process of buying a home: hire your own inspector, don't let the real estate agent/company do it for you.
posted by tgrundke at 10:52 AM on March 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

The Potato Gasline Cap.

Dear AskMefi: "Would attaching my potato to an active gasline help it sprout faster?" thx.
posted by R. Mutt at 10:58 AM on March 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

That is not the tater you are looking for.
posted by Pragmatica at 11:20 AM on March 7, 2010

See also Naval Safety Photo of the Week and There, I Fixed It.
posted by mccarty.tim at 11:22 AM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

But then again, when the inspector is hired by the real estate company...what do you expect?

I am no expert, since my husband and I are just now in the process of buying our first home, but at least around here standard operating procedure is the buyer chooses, hires, and pays for the inspector.

Frankly, I'm a little too obsessed with Holmes on Homes on HGTV. It's simultaneously fascinating and terrifying to see how well-meaning people can get fleeced by shady contractors. Sometimes the homeowners didn't do their due-diligence, but other times they did and *still* got shafted. Mike Holmes is a hero to those poor people. I sure hope to never be one of the many that end up in a similar situation.
posted by misskaz at 11:29 AM on March 7, 2010

My deepest wish is to turn Mike Holmes loose on some of the properties the other HGTV shows have worked on--particularly the ones where they knock a house together essentially overnight.

It would be awesome.
posted by Decimask at 11:41 AM on March 7, 2010 [4 favorites]

> It's hard to imagine this electrical panel in the shower is for real

I've lived in an apartment with just that setup, except it was just a tub (the apartment didn't have a shower) and it was fuses, not breakers.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:03 PM on March 7, 2010

The funny part is that This Old House probably contributed to some of these disasters as being sort of the source of the DIY movement. A buddy of mine bought a house full of these things. In one instance a closet light consisted of a bulb on a wire with a foil wrapped cardboard reflector.
posted by caddis at 12:26 PM on March 7, 2010

Back in the late 1980s I worked for a very small (but successful) steel brokerage in both a clerical and sales capacity. Anyway, I always also helped the owner out with all his personal correspondence (he was on many different boards of charities). When he purchased a $350,000 home (for which he paid cash!), he first had this local home inspector of note (the inspector had a weekly column in the Free Press giving advise to homeowners) personally inspect the house. The guy gave it two thumbs up, Boss moved in, and less than a month later his basement flooded after a small thunderstorm. He had me come over and take Polaroids of the pooling water, and while there I could see the marks on the basement walls indicating that it had flooded before. I spent many months typing letters to the home inspector, the state of Michigan and I forget who all else during the time that Boss sued everyone for his swampy basement. So I've always been leery of the whole house inspector thing - how do you know if they're not being paid off by someone, who knows where their interest lies, etc.
posted by Oriole Adams at 12:28 PM on March 7, 2010

Just got our home inspection report back. We were wary of the property (it has been vacant for nearly two years) and wanted to hire the local Ivan the Terrible of inspecting. He was booked, but he referred us to someone else.

I've already noticed a couple of things that our inspector missed. Of course, the property needs about $20,000 worth of work over the next three years or so, so a hole in one of the exterior walls to plug in a sprinker system is relatively small potatoes.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:53 PM on March 7, 2010

The best part of this series is the comments. Some of the comments demonstrate a rivalry between the tradesmen and the inspectors. Also it shows that some of the inspectors don't know what they are looking at. ie. low voltage fuse in a hvac unit.

That site loads super slow for me kind of annoying to have a slow site that insists on a one image per page format, but par for the course.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 1:59 PM on March 7, 2010

Home Inspectors suck. Anyone can hang out a shingle. You can't negotiate without a home inspector's report. In other words, as an educated homeowner I can read the inspection plate on a water heater or furnace and see that it is at or past the end of its useful life. I can't go renegotiate the deal because I am not a home inspector. When they miss something, and you try to call them on it, they say 'read the contract.' Just burn four hundred dollar bills, it's the same result.
posted by fixedgear at 2:11 PM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is giving me terrible memories of the house I lived in last year, in which the entirety of the (eternally humid) finished basement was basically not up to code, as the walls were all built with untreated wood, the rug could potentially obscure cracks in the foundation (a particularity of local building codes, it seems), and the air conditioning exhaust was routed to the space above the first floor bathroom, the ceiling of which eventually opened up and started dripping water whenever the AC went on. This all happened after the first and most traumatic incident in which a flush in the first floor bathroom rained shit down on the basement bathroom, where a huge udder of human waste hung from the ceiling, trapped in between the floor boards and the paint.

The conclusion of all this is that I hope the people that rigged all these things up are living with their contraptions and not renting them out to other folks. That's a dick move.
posted by invitapriore at 3:01 PM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

Home Inspectors suck.

Not all of them. Case in point, the problems linked in this very post were uncovered by - home inspectors! A certified inspector with good references can save you thousands of dollars in future repairs in return for the few hundred you spend on an inspection. They're also often self-employed/small business owners - hardly the Big Bad Guy in most real estate transactions.

disclaimer: I'm related to a home inspector. I may be biased, but I've also seen first-hand the training he's been through, and the amount of care he puts into inspections and reports, and how many times he's helped clueless home buyers get out of bad situations.
posted by donnagirl at 3:14 PM on March 7, 2010

When you say there should be a law, there is a law. The vendor is liable to a personal lawsuit for intentionally concealing significant safety issues in a sale property. The home inspector should be too. (depending upon your lawyer, resources, taste for litigation, caveat emptor, etc).
posted by ovvl at 3:22 PM on March 7, 2010

Sellers can be sued for non-disclosure. Home inspection contracts are so tightly written that the inspector is not liable for their omissions and oversights.
posted by fixedgear at 3:25 PM on March 7, 2010

We had a home inspector talk us out of two houses we wanted. I was happily surprised.
posted by Kloryne at 3:25 PM on March 7, 2010

caveat emptor, et cetera: have you ever bought a home without taking a critical view of the basement? All of these Home Inspection Nightmares featured in this post seem kind of obvious to even the untrained eye. They mostly appear to be the untrained work of a home-owner fixer-upper.
posted by ovvl at 3:32 PM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

...but when you rip open the walls you find some really weird stuff sometimes.
posted by ovvl at 3:46 PM on March 7, 2010

In other words, as an educated homeowner I can read the inspection plate on a water heater or furnace and see that it is at or past the end of its useful life.

Home Inspectors suck.

Sorry about that.
posted by ovvl at 3:50 PM on March 7, 2010

What ovvl said. We paid a home inspector before buying, but after living here for a while I think the only thing on his report that I couldn't have found out for myself was that the electrical main box should be upgraded to the new minimum amperage. Mostly it's just a checklist full of things that should be obvious... Having said that, buying a house is a stressful time, and if you've never done any DIY it's probably an intimidating task.
posted by sneebler at 3:52 PM on March 7, 2010

I have to admit that we just installed a new shower which is held to the wall by a single screw and the water input pipe, with a small plastic french fry wedged in to prevent excessive stress on the whole structure.

This is only a quick fix until we can get a plumber in to fix the length of the water input pipe, at which point there will be more thorough attachment to the wall. And by god, I will not abide another fry.
posted by Katemonkey at 4:02 PM on March 7, 2010

I love This Old House, but I hate their site to death.

To everyone: click the "print" link. and you get all the photos and captions on one page.
posted by toekneebullard at 4:34 PM on March 7, 2010 [4 favorites]

Crappy home repair isn't new. We found live wires in our wall surrounded by newspaper from the 1930's.
posted by Lucinda at 5:22 PM on March 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

My deepest wish is to turn Mike Holmes loose on some of the properties the other HGTV shows have worked on--particularly the ones where they knock a house together essentially overnight.

They built one of those TV-show houses for a family here where I live a year or so ago. The local coverage was all, "deserving family with disable child finally gets the house they deserve!"

A recent newspaper article talked about how the family has been unable to sell their old house, and can barely afford the utilities on the huge extreme house the show built for them. They're likely headed for bankruptcy.

pffft.
posted by not that girl at 5:38 PM on March 7, 2010

Here...all the Home Inspector wanna-be's can play Fine Homebuilding's "The Inspector", a fun little online game that was harder than I thought it would be, considering I live with the nuts and bolts of this stuff.

(And if you're into serious DIY and don't know about Fine Homebuilding? Welcome to filet mignon, after chomping on the hamburger that is TOH.)
posted by jeanmari at 5:47 PM on March 7, 2010 [3 favorites]

Every time any tradespeople would walk by the front yard of my carriage house, they would point at a little pipe coming up out of the ground and say, "buried oil tank, huh?" Plumber, carpenters, everybody noticed it and commented. Each time I wanted to stab my home inspector just a little bit harder.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 7:59 PM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

> A recent newspaper article talked about how the family has been unable to sell their old house, and can barely afford the utilities on the huge extreme house the show built for them. They're likely headed for bankruptcy.

White elephant, huh? That's about what I expected. I wonder how often the real denouement is like that. Sad for the family, though.
posted by Decimask at 8:33 PM on March 7, 2010

Protip: If you're looking for a house, ask your realtor for a list of home inspectors that they recommend. This way, you'll know which ones to avoid.
posted by dr_dank at 9:48 PM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I wonder how many of these were based on AskMe answers.

Essentially this was recommended on askme in the last week.
posted by Mitheral at 11:56 PM on March 7, 2010

I wonder how many of these were based on AskMe answers.

I'm starting to worry about that.
posted by flabdablet at 12:11 AM on March 8, 2010

We hired home inspectors on their willingness to work with first time home buyers. The husband and wife couple we hired did just a lot to help educate us and were very thorough. When we called inspectors, we asked questions including, "do you go into crawl spaces?" and "do you go up on roofs?". Both should be a resounding yes. Show up with your inspector and walk around.
posted by plinth at 7:06 AM on March 8, 2010

Metafilter: a huge udder of human waste
posted by banshee at 2:28 PM on March 9, 2010