Home Inspection Guides & Checklists

It is standard practice in this industry to put a checklist behind an email form. We publish ours in full instead, for two reasons. The first is practical: gated content is invisible to search engines, and on a site whose entire strategy is organic visibility, hiding the most useful pages behind a wall is a bad trade.

The second is that a checklist you have to trade your details for is a worse checklist. These are meant to be printed and carried around the house with a flashlight in the other hand. If they are useful, and you later need a real inspection, the phone number is at the top of every page. That seems like a fairer arrangement than holding a checklist hostage.

The most productive way to use these guides is as the thing that happens twice a year, with a professional inspection at the points where something is actually at stake — before you buy, before you list, when a carrier asks, and periodically once a house passes twenty years old. They are not substitutes for each other and they catch different problems.

Your own walk catches change. You know what the ceiling above the hall looked like last spring because you photographed it, so a faint new stain stands out. You know the AC used to keep up in August. You know the back door used to close without a shove. That kind of drift is genuinely valuable information and it is precisely what an inspector visiting once cannot give you, because he has no baseline. Bring it to the inspection — a homeowner who says “that stain appeared in June” has narrowed a roof question to a specific weather event.

The professional inspection catches what you structurally cannot see or cannot reasonably interpret. Roof covering condition and installation quality. Attic framing, ventilation and the roof-to-wall connections that determine what goes on a wind mitigation form. Crawl space moisture and subfloor condition. Electrical panel brand, breaker sizing and the condition of the service entrance. Whether the supply plumbing is a material with a known failure history. Whether the HVAC is at the end of its life or the middle. An inspection that skipped the attic and the crawl space has skipped the two places where the expensive findings live.

Used together they change the economics considerably, because building problems in this climate compound rather than accumulate steadily. Moisture is the common thread in almost all of it: a gutter discharging at the foundation becomes grading failure becomes crawl space humidity becomes subfloor decay. A roof fastener that starts weeping becomes sheathing damage becomes a framing repair. A condensate line that backs up becomes an air handler failure. Catching any of those at the first stage is a few hundred dollars of maintenance; catching them at the third is a contract renegotiation.

A practical note on record-keeping. Photograph from the same few positions each time — the roof from the street, each elevation, the water heater and air handler data plates, the electrical panel with the cover on, the crawl space entry — and keep the images dated alongside a short note of what you found and what you did. Beyond making drift visible, that record settles the most common insurance dispute after a storm: whether damage was caused by the event or was pre-existing wear, which is excluded under essentially every policy. It also shortens the conversation considerably when you eventually sell.

Finally, know which findings end the walk and start a phone call. Any smell of gas. Any scorching, buzzing or warmth at an electrical panel or outlet. Active water running where it should not be. A floor that has gone visibly out of level since you last noticed. Standing water in a crawl space. A ceiling stain that is growing rather than stable. None of those are checklist items to be noted and carried on past — they are reasons to stop and get someone qualified in front of it.