This class covers some of the most common home inspection defects and clarifies whether these are a big deal or a small deal.

• Negotiations after the inspection
• Problems with ‘flipped’ houses
• What’s the big deal about a cracked heat exchanger?
• Furnace certification/safety check/service call…what’s the difference?
• What’s the concern with the double tapped circuit breakers, really?
• Federal Pacific Electric panels
• Aluminum wiring
• How to spot a buried fuel oil tank
• Ice dam myths
• Top deck defects
• Stone veneer siding, the new stucco?
• New construction defects

This course is focused on the most common home inspection defects that come up during inspections of old houses, with a focus on old Minneapolis and Saint Paul homes.  Topics include:

• General differences between old and new homes
• Chimneys, chimney scans
• Boilers
• Gravity furnaces
• Roof lines, problems associated with old roofs
• Miscellaneous old-houses features (aka “doo-hickeys”)
• Bedrooms
• Plumbing: drum traps, floor drains, S-traps, steel drains, steel water lines, lead water supplies, cross-connections
• Asbestos
• Electrical – overhead wires, fuse panels, knob and tube wiring, ungrounded outlets and fixtures
• Foundations
• Ice dams

This class will cover residential design problems that lead to water intrusion. The most common failure locations will be covered, which includes:

• Roofs, problematic roof designs
• Ground water management problems
• Chimney problems (both masonry and wood)
• Siding failures
• Window failures