Why You Should Have a Home Inspected Before You Buy It Captain Dapper's Firsthand Experience With a Home Inspection

As I've mentioned here a few times before, The Mister and I are on the hunt for a small vacation home. We have a few simple requirements: it needs to be within 3 to 3 1/2 hours of Chicago, the house must include at least 2 acres of land and it should be move-in ready. Now, by move-in ready I don't mean that the house must be absolutely perfect. On the contrary, actually. I'm looking forward to making some updates and generally giving the house a Captain Dapper overhaul. By move-in ready I mean that the house must be livable - working plumbing, solid foundation, a roof that doesn't need immediate replacement and so on.

A couple of weeks ago we found the perfect house. On our first time viewing, I pulled The Mister aside and said, "I love it. I want to buy it TODAY!" He agreed. Still, we played it cool. We came back to Chicago that day and continued to discuss it. A couple of weeks later, having made a long list of things we wanted to double check, we went back to see the house again. This time, we agreed, we would  make an offer on the house if everything looked OK.

And so we did. We made a low offer and hoped for the best. A few days later, on my birthday, the seller counter offered. It just so happened that his counter offer was the number we had in mind so we accepted. It all seemed perfect, like a wonderful birthday present from the universe. We immediately started thinking and dreaming and decorating what would become our little country getaway. Talking about our plans for the house became the overriding theme of the day - which, you know, is not a bad way to spend a birthday.

This all happened on a Friday and over the weekend we were able to contact a home inspector to set up a an inspection for the following week. Now, we've only purchased one property before - the recently gut rehabbed condo that we now call home. Everything was pretty cut and dry during the inspection for the condo. Since the building had been gutted, everything was new - plumbing, electrical, everything. At the time it felt like kind of a rip off to pay for an inspection. But, actually, the inspector was able to explain a few things in our new condo that were unaware of. OK, I thought, this is totally worth the money.

The next week we drove back to the house for the inspection. When we pulled up to the house, the Realtor met us at the front door and said the inspector was in the back yard trying to inspect the septic system. We walked around to the back of the house and came upon a very perplexed home inspector.

"I'm not quite sure what's going on here," he said.

The Mister and I both looked at each other, telepathically conveying an oh shit to each other.

It turns out that oh shit is not far from the truth. The inspector discovered that the house has a homemade septic system that is not up to code, could be leaking waste in the ground (which could be contaminating the groundwater) and buried in such a shallow hole that one could easily fall through the rusted contraption that's holding years and years of waste water. In other words, there's a rusted steel drum containing 30+ years of shit buried in the back yard. What a way to start an inspection!

While the inspector looked over the rest of the house, I started Googling around to see what a new septic system might cost. From my early findings it looked like we were staring at $10,000 in septic repairs. Oh shit indeed!

The rest of the house checked out OK but the septic was obviously a big issue for us. We doubted that our loan would be approved with the septic as-is and, even if we could secure the loan with the septic in its current condition, we weren't willing to part with $10,000 shortly after closing. We talked about having the seller reduce the price to reflect the repair cost but we ended up ruling that out. First of all, the job could end up costing quite a bit more than $10k and we're not willing to take that chance. Secondly, there's a big barrel of shit buried in the back yard! Um, no, I can't get on board with that.

So, in the end, we gave the seller the option to repair the septic before we move forward. Unfortunately, that didn't go as planned. Instead, the seller is going to take the house off the market, repair the septic and then list it again at a slightly higher price. We may bid on the house again after the septic is repaired but we're also looking around for another house.

All of this is to say that hiring a home inspector saved us a huge headache, lots of money and, quite possibly, from falling into a cesspool of shit. There is no way that we would have thought to dig around in the back yard to look at the septic system. I didn't even know how a septic system worked until the inspector explained it. And while we're sad that the sale of the house didn't proceed problem-free, we're comforted to know that the money we spent on the inspection saved us from a potentially nightmarish situation. Not to mention, a $600 home inspection for a house we're not going to buy is a lot easier to accept than a $10,000 repair on a house we just bought.

And that, my dear readers, is why you should always have a home inspected before you buy it.

Image: Jason Loper