How To Buy A House And Not Lose Sex: How to Find the Best House, Make the Best Offer, and Keep Your Love Life! by Hess Sean

Author:Hess, Sean [Hess, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780996121804
Publisher: Cartwheelze Publishing
Published: 2015-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

The subcontractors who do the actual construction on new homes can—and do—cut corners. Sometimes it’s a deliberate attempt to save money, sometimes it’s that the subs knocked off early or rushed something on a Friday afternoon, sometimes it’s a lazy sub, and sometimes a crew will get pulled onto another home unexpectedly and never get back to finish, or forget to finish.

Imagine yourself as a sub making $7.93 an hour. You just made it home on a Friday and realize you forgot to connect something that probably won’t be missed right away. Maybe a drain-line extension for the overflow on a hot-water heater. Are you going to call the super and go back? Nope. You’re going to shut your mouth and plead ignorance if anyone notices. That really happens.

When my friend bought a new home, we did a home inspection beforehand and discovered that the insulation was missing over half of the living area. So we had it fixed before closing.

Had he moved in with the insulation missing, his electric bill would have been off the charts, because the heating and cooling units would have been working too hard … and he wouldn’t have known any better because the house had no utility history. Problem solved by a $350 inspection that probably saved him that much in electricity in the first two months of ownership.

The second reason to have a home inspection is that it helps you create a punch list for items that aren’t done yet so the builder can fix these items before you close and move in: electrical outlets that weren’t connected, a toilet that was cracked during installation and is leaking, or other minor things.

With my new home, the inspector found a ton of small items that even I as a broker missed: Gouges in concrete, a bad breaker in the fuse panel, some missing stucco near the roofline, all sorts of minor things.

Most of these items were fixed before we moved in. It also helped that when we found other things after we moved in, there wasn’t already a long line of stuff waiting to be fixed.

Upgrade, or Not an Upgrade?

I have an irrational, nearly insane, liquid-black hate for crown molding.

I should clarify. I don’t mind crown molding installed. Crown molding can make a bigger room look smaller, which can be a nice touch in a large dining room that you want make feel more intimate.

No, what I hate is when somebody calls crown molding an “upgrade” on a production model (i.e. non-custom) home. Cheap pine boards milled for 13 cents a linear foot at some facility in central Georgia, and then sold at $25 a linear foot to end users in production-line new construction. You can even imagine me with my hands upraised and making quotation marks as I mouth the word “upgrade,” I hate them so much.

“Hate” is a pretty strong word. Why do I feel that emotion so strongly? Because I have never gotten a listing where the owner insisted that the crown molding was an upgrade.

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