Thursday, May 31, 2012

Do your job - home inspection edition

One of Bell Belichick's favorite lines for his football team is "do your job." (Side note - I don't like Belichick at all, but that doesn't mean I don't think he is a brilliant football coach.) If you are a quarterback then make the right throw and if you are a receiver then catch the ball. It seems like a pretty simple concept, but then again a lot of people seem to worry about things that are outside their area of expertise. Also, on the flipside there are plenty other people who seem to be incompetent at their chosen profession.
Continuing on with that theme, I am livid right now because of what I think is complete incompetence on something that should be routine. Today we were supposed to have our home inspection. M had *lined this up with the inspector and talked to the contractor on Monday to make sure that today was a good day. We both made arrangements and took time off from work to be there for the inspection. Everything looked to be going well in preparation for our closing next Friday.

*Shouldn't the real estate agent do this?
I show up at the house and the inspector is just shaking his head. Immediately he told me that this house was in no way ready for an inspection, and a quick walk through reveled all the obvious reasons why. It still looked like a work site with many, many things left to do. There would have been no point in starting an inspection when the house was so far removed from actually being finished. The inspector said the home should be "98% finished" by the time he should be there, and I have no idea how our contractor could think this home was 98% finished.

What is really baffling to me is that this isn't the first home our real estate agent has sold or the first home our contractor has remodeled. How do they not know this home isn't ready for inspection? I don't mean to be indignant or unfair in any way, but these are the questions in my head. Maybe that makes me mean - I don't know and I don't really know if I care. All of this is making me question the big decisions that we've made. Was it the right decision to buy? Was it the right decision to pick these people? Was it the right decision to sign a contract on this house? I know that right now is a low point, and that I will calm down about the state of this home, but this day was (as you can probably imagine by now) very frustrating.

On our end we saved enough for a down payment, secured a loan and met every single deadline that has been given to us. I know we have a lot less to do than actually remodeling our home, but then again it isn't our job to remodel homes. It is just upsetting to me for us to be so close to buying this home, but also to feel like things just aren't working out in a way that I expected.

1 comment:

Buck said...

The inspection is part of your due diligence, not the realtor's responsibility. We took recommendations from our realtor on good inspectors.
Can you use this as a bargaining chip with the sellers to shave some additional money off the price or extract additional accommodations?