Looking at a new home? Don’t sign that mortgage contract too quickly. Almost half of Americans will live in a single home for 6-10 years.
When buying a home, most people are focused on the neighborhood, the neighbors, and all the bells and whistles. The problem is, you are looking at the home with the eyes of an amateur. What sort of nasty things await you that only an expert would notice?
Get a new home inspection ASAP to find those things. Here are seven reasons you should get a home inspection.
1. A New Home Inspection Catches Minor Construction Errors
These days, they don’t build homes like they used to. People falsely assume that a new home build is perfect and flawless. That’s not always the case.
TikTok videos abound where a home inspector finds shower doors with no opening space, canted toilets, and glaring holes in the cladding. Contractors and subcontractors often work at a blistering fast pace with no concern for doing the job right. If you wait until you have moved in and then discover overlooked problems, you’ll have no recourse.
Finding and reporting these issues early allows you to get them fixed by the developer on their dime. Even doing a walk-through with an inspector is better than nothing.
2. It Ensures Everything’s Built to Code
Residential codes are strict for a reason, and they’re not inherently some pointless government red tape. Most of them are in place to protect your life and those of your family. These can include things like fire codes, electrical codes, and so on.
Fixing something and bringing it back to code could easily cost a fortune. Take, for example, if that exhaust pipe we mentioned earlier is false and goes into the wall. That’s a massive fire hazard right there.
Replacing/fixing that exhaust pipe would probably mean ripping out the walls. It might involve tearing through pipes and wiring, making a mess, and having to rebuild around it. That would suck a lot if you’re currently living in the home, so get an inspector to look at it now.
3. It Finds Foundation Issues
Foundation issues are hard to spot but can have devastating consequences. A weak foundation could easily cause a portion-or all-of your home to collapse. It can start with a small crack and quickly spread through the entire home.
Foundational issues can be the sort that make it a losing battle to fix them. Whether the problem is the concrete pour, or structural ones that go to the home’s skeleton and mounting piles, you’ll be in for a rough time.
Fixing foundation issues is tricky and, you guessed it, expensive. A new home build should have zero foundation issues. If there is one, it’s critical to report it to the developer and get it fixed on their dime.
4. It Finds Wiring Issues
The wiring in your home requires the work of a trained electrician for good reason. Wiring the place incorrectly could lead to constant shorts, busted appliances, and life-threatening shocks.
Like with foundational issues, these are things you won’t notice just from a look. It requires a detailed evaluation using calibrated equipment and a battery of tests.
In some cases, it might be a simple issue of swapping out a busted breaker. In others, there could be serious construction flaws that put your life on the line. In either case, an inspection will reveal these problems.
5. It Finds Exterior Structure Problems
Again, you can find endless TikTok videos where contractors stumble upon embarrassing construction gaffes. They find facade bricks that pop off with a gentle tug, or a slapdash putty texture job.
Even if these aren’t critical structural elements, they can lead to expensive replacements. Just head to your local home-improvement store and check the price on a pallet of decorative bricks.
As we’ve mentioned, there may be major issues like an exhaust pipe that doesn’t actually go through the house. Backed-up exhaust could easily cause a fire, or lead to carbon monoxide poisoning. A simple exterior inspection could reveal these issues.
6. It Finds Plumbing Problems
Water damage is one of those silent problems that leads to massively expensive consequences when it rears its ugly head. A teeny-tiny drip drip that continues over the course of years, ruining wood and drywall. It might be the annoying kind that you actually hear or one that you don’t hear at all until it’s too late.
The problem is that you probably wouldn’t notice these plumbing problems until you had been living in the home full-time. An inspector can run some tests and take a look at the pipes before that. If there’s a leak under the floorboards or a problem pipe behind the drywall, they can find it.
7. It Gives You Peace of Mind
At the end of the day, peace of mind is what really matters here. Moving is already an incredibly exhausting, expensive, and draining process. It takes the average person months to settle into a new home, even assuming everything goes according to plan.
Now imagine you’re six months in and some of the issues above suddenly appear. It ruins your ability to enjoy the comfort, peace, and relaxation at home should provide.
Major problems will have contractors, technicians, and plumbers invading your personal space for days or weeks. You have to go through the whole rigmarole of establishing their bona fides and dealing with issues they present-and that’s to say nothing of paying their rates. Getting that inspection done ahead of time affords you peace of mind you wouldn’t get otherwise.
Get Your Home Inspected
A new home inspection is a must whether you are moving into a brand-new home build or an old one. Doing so can reveal construction problems, foundation issues, plumbing and electrical issues, and so on. What’s most important, of course, is the peace of mind nipping these issues in the bud early on.