After the offers were accepted, the process really snowballed from there. The buyer of my old house was requesting inspections, and I requested inspections to be performed on my new house. It seems customary to me that people get the home inspection and termite inspection. But each buyer can choose at their discretion what inspections they’d like performed at the new home.
On my new home, I requested a home inspection, termite inspection and HVAC inspection. The home is still fairly new (built in 2014), and I wasn’t worried about termites. The home inspection came back with some minor plumbing issues and a window in my son’s new bedroom that didn’t lock properly. Really minor stuff.
Various Inspections
Now the HVAC inspection was another matter. The first time I saw the air conditioner in the backyard, I knew that I’d want an HVAC inspection on the unit. It looked rough. As though it had never seen a day of maintenance. I scheduled for one of our senior HVAC technicians to go to the home and assess the unit. He looked at it and confirmed my suspicions that it had never received maintenance since being installed at the home. In fact, he couldn’t fully inspect the unit because a part in the air conditioner didn’t work anymore and prevented the technician from performing a full diagnostic on the unit.
My buyer on my old house requested four inspections to start, which were a home inspection, termite inspection, sewer scope inspection and radon inspection. Why radon? My old home is fairly close to the Petroglyphs, and there’s something about the proximity to the Petroglyphs that makes the home at a higher risk of radon.
Last Minute Buyer Decisions
Following the home inspection on my old house, the buyer decided almost at the last minute that they wanted a mold inspection. I couldn’t figure out why they wanted the inspection, and I realized that it must have been something that came up on the home inspection report. Sure enough, I was right. We soon found out that the inspector found bowing on a baseboard in the living room, and that caused them to say that there was possible water damage, which meant possible mold in the wall. They also thought that the mold was caused by the downspout off my front door.
Here’s where the story becomes one big gray hair. The mold inspector did a cavity test, where he took off the switch plate for the internet connection in the house. His results came back with a high level of one particular mold, and thankfully it wasn’t one of the bad molds. I forwarded his test results to different mold companies around town, and each said the same thing – they wouldn’t know the full extent of the damage, or the work, until they cut into the wall.
Almost No Mold After All
I picked a mold remediation company, and when they came to the house, they were immediately skeptical of the severity. They did note the minor bowing to the baseboard, but they didn’t think the mold problem was as severe as the mold inspector thought it was. They pulled off the baseboard and were still skeptical. Then they cut into the wall and presented me with their findings.
There was HARDLY any mold in the wall! In fact, they became suspicious that the inspector actually got blown in insulation in their test and it resulted in a false positive. The owner of the company looked me in the eye and said, “Honestly, if you weren’t selling your house now, I would tell you not to worry about this for at least another five years.”
Imagine my shock! I asked him if this would change my estimate or the pricing at all. He said that unfortunately, even though there was hardly any mold, it was still the same amount of work that had to be done. This meant that his pricing would not change. I accepted my fate, and they moved on with the work.
They performed the work, including the mold remediation, drywall, texturing and paint. I did save some money on the overall job by providing paint that I already had. The work took roughly 4 days, but that was because they had other jobs they were working on, and they’d come and go from my home. After they cleaned the area, and before they put the drywall back up, they made sure to retest the area.
Abandoned Water Line Discovery
Here’s another kicker to the story. Before they closed the wall, they showed me something and asked me questions about it. They discovered an abandoned water line in the wall. There was NO need for a water line in that wall in the years I lived there. Then the owner of the mold remediation company noticed an area on the outside of the house where a hosebib had possibly been in the past. He said that the water line and mold was in that same area inside the house. We came to the conclusion that there had possibly been a hosebib on the front of the house, and there had most likely been a leak in the past. Instead of properly cleaning the area, a previous owner most likely decided to do away with the hosebib, abandoned the water line and closed the wall without taking care of the water damage and potential mold. Gotta love other peoples’ poor decisions and shotty work, huh?
Talk about stress, right? To add the cherry on top, I was still going to have to pay this bill. I felt like I was hemorrhaging money on this house AND my new house. I literally asked my broker when I was going to be done spending money. She couldn’t give me an answer, but I found out on my own. The answer was not yet.
Another Installment Coming Soon!
The great moving saga isn’t quite done yet. We’ll have another installment for you to check out. Wanna know how closing went? What else was needed for the new home? Keep reading!