New Jersey Home Inspection Defects Vid#4. Know What Problems Exist in the Home That You are Buying.

John here from look Smart Home Inspections and I perform comprehensive Home Inspections throughout the state of New Jersey so today I have another defects video for you guys so these are just some of the more interesting things that I found recently in doing home inspections throughout New Jersey so let's take a look and see what we have so look at this crazy thing we have here so this is a bedroom and if at night you have to go to the bathroom walk out your bedroom look what happens here so if you're not careful you end up right down these stairs so that's a safety hazard and if you put a rail here there's not enough room right here to fit through to the hallway what a crazy setup that is so I'm just looking at these older furnace unit here and we can see that this unit was manufactured in 1993 we can come down here and confirm that also 1993. but you see what's happening is the burner's do light fine but then they quickly turn off they'll turn off right away so we have this kind of short cycling condition and this is something that's going to have to be checked out by a HVAC contractor in order to determine what's causing this it's getting colder it's almost winter we want to make sure that heating unit properly operates so nothing freezes in this house as far as Plumbing so this is something that's going to be written up I already told my client about it and this is something that's going to have to be checked out is there is a possibility that this unit because it's old is going to have to be replaced but that's really for an HVAC contractor side when we do Home Inspections one of the things that we look for is this type of active water staining under the roof so here we see that we have some damage to the roof sheathing right here I can actually poke through that and we do know that the roof is older so chances are this client is going to be putting on a new roof on this house here so I'm inspecting this attic and we see this roof truss here has been repaired by this thin fairing strip right here so this is inadequate when we have a roof troughs over here that is compromised engineering has to be performed in order to make this repair properly so although this looks like a small issue it's actually not a small issue if we look over here we see that this roof truss has also been repaired or cistered improperly which is not something that you would do with a roof truss so an engineer architect would not design this type of repair for a roof Truss if we look over here we see this roof truss has also been damaged and I don't know why it's been damaged and if we look over here we see some more damage to the roof truss almost like annoying has happened almost like an animal has gotten to this type of thing here it's this roof truss so I'm not sure what happened here yet but these Corrections here and here are inadequate and that's going to have to be taken to an engineer to figure out how to do this in the correct way so I'm in the same attic and if you can see this gusset plate is pulling out of this roof truss here it's not even connected on this side so what I think has happened is that we've had some overzealous roofing contractors really bang around this roof and rafter roof truss system and this is the kind of thing we get if we look down here I don't know if you can see it or not but there is another one uh here also that is loose and not connected uh properly I'm in this basement and I notice an odor it's just got a sorry smell uh just just a stinky smell and I look here and there's a sore line right here this is the sore Line This is the shoreline cap so somebody removed the sewer line cap to access the shoreline never put the cap on so this is an indication that something's going wrong because usually a homeowner would not remove this for any reason it's not something that they would normally do so this is something we have to take a closer look at there are some sinks and drains in the house that are slow so I'm going to recommend the customer have a shoreline inspection performed because as a home inspector I cannot view this underground pipe right here I don't know what's going on inside this Shoreline from here all the way out to the street connection so this is something that needs further investigation for sure so I'm just doing a termite inspection of this garage and I know just by looking at it because we have wood Earth contact that there is a high probability of termite activity here so we can just come in here with a screwdriver or a pro and we can see that we go right through I mean nothing here nothing here see that I mean I'm not allowed to cause a lot of damage but you get the idea so imperative to have a proper termite inspection done along with your termite inspection so we don't come up with any surprises that are going to be costly so I just want to show you guys something this is a termite mud tube right here and we can see this termite damage here they're doing this horizontal damage through this garage wall and termites build these mud tubes over their body for protection and these mud tubes are made with a combination of excrement and saliva and they're basically prevent the termite from contacting the air which kills them actually so these mud tubes you should watch out for these if you see these in your garage crawl space or basements you're definitely going to need a termite treatment but this garage here that I'm inspecting has a lot a lot of termite damage it's been neglected for a very long time so significant structural repairs are going to be necessary in this garage I'm in this whole basement and we're looking at this old pipe wrap right here so this is an asbestos containing pipe wrap high in asbestos fibers and you can tell because it has this sort of this honeycomb look to the edge at the end of it so if you see this in a house that you're thinking about buying this is an asbestos pipe wrap it is a health hazard if it's removed if it's Disturbed if you leave it in place it's going to be okay but this particular section is in poor condition so we're going to recommend to the buyer of this house that he have this properly removed by an asbestos abatement contractor just looking at this porch roof and we see that the intersection of this porch roof to this brick veneer house there's no flashing at this intersection right here and it's very important that we have a flashing that's cut into these mortar joints here that actually enters under the roof covering to keep this area free from water entry so this is something this is a defect we always want to see when our lower roof meets the house a flashing and if we move under here we can see what's happening we can see that water is entering this area here they have some expandable foam that they put in here in order to help stop that water from coming but we actually see the dripping right here wood rot over here so I definitely need a flashing in this area and you know I wouldn't be surprised if we would have some wood rot and other damage right at this intersection under this covering right here so this is something that's going to have to be looked into so this is a floor joist under a bathroom and you think that needs to be replaced because of the water leak yeah I would say so so we definitely have something going on here I'm going to go up and run some water under this area in this bathroom and see if we have an active leak down here I'm just inspecting under this bathroom in this old house and we see a pretty substantial active leak I'm running the shower and I always like to come down to the basement to take a look and see if anything's going on and we have plenty that's going on we see that this beam is this joist is very damaged and we see that the there's an active water leak a lot under here and so that's gonna have to be without a doubt corrected and this joist uh replaced because of the damage that is going on here whenever we have porch roof columns like this that support a porch roof like this right here what I always like to do is to try to do my best to put a screwdriver or a probe under here and that's going to really help us determine if there's wood Rod but but look at this there's nothing there's nothing under here it's just basically the aluminum left which is the exterior covering so these are difficult to diagnose we have to definitely get something under here to see if there's any kind of water damage but it's really difficult to see what's going on under these under these columns so I'm going to tell the client that they should try to peel back some of the sheet metal to see the extent of the damage because we have snow and ice laying up under here and it it's wicking into that wood column uh that's supporting this uh porch roof so uh you know make sure you guys look for this type of thing when you're buying a house or even own a home with these type of columns that are covered with sheet metal or siding on the exterior of the home look for this wood rot one of the things that we want to look for when we look at a dishwasher is to make sure that it's secure to its cabinet opening here we see that this one is not secure at all so we don't want to have a child come up on here on this door lean on the door and the dishwasher topple over so just like a range dishwasher should be properly secure so it doesn't move in its cabinet opening so this needs a minor correction just to make sure that this is a safe installation just taking a look at the area around this masonry chimney and if we see here this is wet so we actually have leakage around the chimney which is most likely caused by a poorly installed chimney flashing there wasn't really much visible from outside but that's why we look underneath the chimney and you can see all this water penetration here and here it's all wet so we definitely need a new chimney flashing on this around this chimney from the exterior because we're just going to have all this water just leaking in here you can come down the chimney and cause damage to the house and the roof decking and all the roof framing around it so this is a chimney right in here and this is what happens when we don't have a good or properly configured chimney flashing we have evidence of water damage around this chimney Sawyer its holes the client that they're going to definitely need a chimney flashing also a new roof because the roof is shot the chimney doesn't appear to be lined and there's a lot of cracking at the chimney top and no rain hats so there's a lot of Chimney work that's going to have to be done in this house so make sure you guys look at this inside take a look for any water damage any water staining around the chimney in homes that you own and are thinking about buying so I'm just taking a look at this water heater and we see that this vent pipe right here is a three inch vent pipe this pipe should be a four inch vent pipe and it should have a nice upward slope but what we have here is a downward slope not an upward slope so our exhaust Gap have a chance of better here because of this negative shape there and the improper size of this uh smoke pipe from the water heater so this is a Telltale sign of non-professional water heater insulation and so I'm going to ask my client definitely to get the permits and also a plumbing contractor is going to have to make sure that this is safe and ready to go we can see down here that this smoke pipe doesn't fit on top of this top of this water heater flange well we can see that it's not properly secure so we know that this is the smoke pipe from an old water heater that was retrofit to this newer water heater and this is here and so I'm in this cold room in this basement so this area right here is actually under the front porch and I find a lot of water seepage and water penetration problems in here because it's almost impossible to make this ceiling which is structural cement water tight so if we move down here we can actually see some water penetration here so we have some puddling of water here and it's wet you know right through here and if we look up at the ceiling the ceiling is also wet ceiling is wet ceiling is is wet so um this is all wet you can see that so this crack would have to be sealed up the funny thing is that there's really no cracking uh visible on the front porch from the outside but uh definitely some water penetration here this can create mold growth and bad things happen so this is something that's going to have to be addressed because we don't want to have just water stagnating here you can also see some mold growth under here this is like a like an insulation that was glued to the underside of this cement ceiling we can see some mold developing here this is pretty nasty and so this is going to probably need remediation as well right here see that mold right there I just want to thank you guys for watching the video I certainly appreciate it hopefully you learned a little bit about maybe a house that you're thinking about buying or a house that you live in and remember stay empowered and keep your eyes open

Channel: John Martino-LookSmart Home Inspections

Views: 3,985

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Id: TiYRcKypAfQ

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2022