The Home Inspection: Who should do it?

During your own inspection of the house, you can find out a lot about the house by yourself. However, the home inspection should be done by a professional home inspector who belongs to one or more of the home inspection societies and/or has lots of experience inspecting houses. Usually, it is not enough to hire a building contractor to inspect the house.

You are going to have to pay a fee for the home inspection so insist on a written report. A top of the line home inspection report should be prepared off site after the inspection and should be carefully written. Although you could do all of this yourself, the home inspection report has more validity if prepared by a party disinterested in the sale. You should use the site inspection as an opportunity to find out where potential problems are located in the house and the written report should clearly state that. While the inspector is doing his job collecting data, you can follow along but try not to direct the course of the inspection yourself. The inspector has only a limited amount of time to investigate the house and needs 100% concentration in order to complete the process. A good inspector will concentrate on gathering the data for your report as efficiently as possible and does not have time to "show" the house. He may even request additional time if the house is particularly large, has an unusual design, or has many low clearance crawl spaces.

OK. You've arrived at the house. Before entering the house, your home inspector is likely to want to get a general idea of the house by looking around outside first. He will probably walk around the perimeter of the house. General items of interest at this point include grade clearance, ground contact, and grade slope. He is likely to want to make a mental note of the location of exterior doors and decks so that later on in the basement he can check the condition of the adjacent sills. Other good mental notes to make are the location of the chimneys and plumbing vents, electric utility meters, and heating oil fill and vent pipes.

After that, a good place to start inside is in the attic.