The Inspection

Bright and early at 9 am on Sunday we were at the home on Lyndale to go through our inspection. (Needless to say after a long weekend - I passed out on the in-law's couch later that day!) We got an inspection from Residential Inspection Services (952.929.7323) and he was really great. Very knowledgeable very thorough he made me feel better about some things because it gave me a much better understanding of many things. At the same time, he pointed out other things that I didn't even know about or notice - which caused me some anxiety. One being that the roof "which was replaced in 1999" was only a half truth. The front was replaced but the back was not and is in extremely poor shape and needs to be replaced immediately. So that's lame. (In fact, he said the front of the house looked rather worn and he suggested if we had the money to replace the whole thing, but he did say we could potentially just replace the back.)

I mean we were under the impression that this house was in decent shape and now out of the blue we have to fork out thousands of dollars for a new roof? So Kevin is contacting their realtor to get a feeling for their stance because he's mad too - when you say that a roof was replaced and don't mention it was only have replaced? I mean that changes everything - the house is no longer worth to us what we agreed to pay for it - but it's sold as-is so that's going to make things difficult. So we are waiting to hear back from Kevin. What a mess.

Other than the roof, everything was expected. There's some basement windows that have rot, which we knew about, that need to be replaced at some point because they have their gardens way above grade. The bottom board on two or so windows needs to be replaced. The gutters need to be cleaned and in some cases extended to do a better job of getting the water away from the house. The original garage door doesn't work which is fine at the moment because we have a shed to lock things in. The boiler and water heaters are new and running well. The windows are original and at some point need to be replaced. I mean it is old and the people who owned it were old - things weren't taken care of the way they should have been. And did I mention they had pigeons?

Ugh, who keeps pigeons as pets? The city of St. Paul is giving the pigeons birth control and our sellers are trying to encourage their existence. No wonder the next door neighbor has screens everywhere. The more I learn about them the more I think they had to be weirdos. I just can't wait to get into the house and start working on it. There's a lot of things that can be fixed without costing a lot of money. I am just worried about the roof, we didn't expect to have to replace something that intense and expensive right off the bat. *SIGH* I know this is totally cliched, but owning a house (and we don't even own it yet) is a lot of work! HA :)