Charles's Seattle Home Inspection Blog

Follow me
By
Home Inspector - Charles Buell Inspections Inc.
My blog is intended to provide information related to home inspections in Seattle, surrounding communities and anyone else interested. Sometimes I will provide information that has nothing to do with home inspections. Enjoy!

ARCHIVED BLOG POSTS

2014 

  I find that homeowners often have dangerous things around their homes that they are unaware of. This post is done in the spirit of keeping homeowners vigilant as to serious safety issues--and in particular combustible gas issues. If you have gas or propane at your home, you may have a gas outle...
09/27/2014
What kid could resist “Transformers?”   When I was a kid, we didn’t have Transformers, but we had Zorro, the Lone Ranger, Spiderman and Superman, that could indeed transform themselves into other things.  They were, and are, a common metaphor for becoming powerful when we feel we have no power.  ...
09/23/2014
17 Comments
Some inspections are more distressing than others. The other day, I did an inspection of a 3700 square foot house built in 1999 and it only took 10 minutes. You read that correctly--10 minutes! Even from the street I could see that the paint was peeling EVERYWHERE.  The house was a foreclosure, a...
09/20/2014
Someone recently asked me what to do about three prong receptacles that have been installed in ungrounded circuits.  It is VERY common to see this in older homes and solutions were not all that problematic.  One could either take out the receptacles and replace them with GFI type receptacles or r...
09/16/2014
If you think electricity is always trying to “go to ground”—you may be the victim of urban legend. For a home inspector this has to be one of the ultimate “urban legends.”  It is a widely held belief (that is further promulgated by inspection training schools).  It is “common knowledge” that elec...
09/15/2014
09/10/2014
At a recent inspection, I was walking around the exterior of the home and I announced to my client that it appeared that at least one of the bathroom exhaust fans terminated at the soffit bird-blocking. They seemed surprised and wanted to know how I could guess that. I pointed to the black discol...
09/07/2014
Themselves and everyone else! Weekend Warriors and Decks are almost synonymous it seems.  Who, after all, can’t build a deck? The truth is much closer to the fact that decks are very complicated structures that require considerable expertise to design and build properly.  It seems like every week...
09/05/2014
09/02/2014
There was an old question a while ago that asked if you knew what your kids were doing.  It turned out that the answer was closer to, more often than not, that it was the kids that did not know what their parents were doing. Regardless the wisdom of how to raise children or parents successfully,...
09/01/2014
Rainmaker
1,341,363

Charles Buell

Seattle Home Inspector
local_phone(206) 478-7371
smartphone(206) 478-7371
Contact The Author

My blog is intended to provide information related to home inspections in Seattle, surrounding communities and anyone else interested. Sometimes I will provide information that has nothing to do with home inspections. Enjoy!

  • Google+
  • Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner