Home Inspection…UGH!

So, bringing us down from our excitement like a lead brick, we got the home inspection report on the Fort Worth house on Monday afternoon. 

Ugh!

There were tons of items on the list, and it seemed like the inspector checked the “deficient” box in almost every section.  I felt sick in the pit of my stomach as I saw all the included photos of cracks in the bricks around the windows, indicating some concerning issues with the foundation.  We knew there had been some settling and that one section of the house had some sloping in the floor, but we hadn’t noticed the cracks on the outside of the house.  This is not good!

I had noticed when we were looking at houses in Fort Worth that so many of them either had current foundation issues or had just had repairs, so I asked the realtor about this.  He said it’s so common there because the soil is clay, and with periods of drought, it causes the foundation to shift over and over again if people don’t actually water their foundations.  So that’s a thing…to water your foundation.  He said they even make a sprinkler system just for watering your foundation nowadays.  Wow!  I had no idea.  We definitely don’t have that problem in Virginia Beach, where we have flooding all the time!  The realtor told us we should get a foundation specialist to further assess just how significant the foundation issues really are.  So we set that up for today at 3:30 PM CT.  After paying almost $600 for the home inspection that included a pool inspection and a termite inspection, I was glad to hear that the foundation specialist would give a free evaluation.

And then there was the pool.  ARGH!  I don’t know the first thing about pools or what to expect from them.  Heck, I can’t even swim for that matter!  The inspector took photos showing some thin cracks in the decking and said there is a visible leak at the main motor.  The pools lights weren’t working, and a breaker keeps tripping and can’t be reset, so we figured it’s related to the pool lights.  That doesn’t sound good, either. I talked to the realtor about it…he has a pool himself.  He said the pool might need some resurfacing, and then with the leak and the breaker issue, he said we should definitely have a pool company look at the issues more closely and give an estimate for repairs.  So I called the guy the realtor uses for his pool, and I set up an appointment for yesterday at the same time the foundation guy will be there so that the realtor can let them both in at once.  That cost another $150.

So yesterday was the big day.  I absolutely won’t budge on requiring the seller to resolve all foundation and pool issues as a condition in the contract, and I also want them to replace the cracked window in the library that the inspector pointed out.  There was plenty of other stuff…a couple of damaged roof tiles and some visible nail heads there (but the roof is only 1 year old), a missing closet door, a door that doesn’t catch properly, a door that needs to be fire-rated coming from the garage, some breakers that aren’t properly labeled in the electrical panel, etc.  My husband is a master electrician by trade, so we weren’t as concerned about those other more minor things.  It is an older home, after all (1976), much like our current home (1974), so we’re familiar with the things that just occur over decades of use.  I’m really anxious to get the foundation and pool reports and estimates for repairs so we can have the realtor propose them to the sellers as part of the deal.  We paid for an “active option” in the contract, so we have until Friday of this week to back out for any reason.  We’d be out about $1,000 that we’ve already put into having this home evaluated, so it’s not optimal, but I also don’t want to buy a money pit.

I have plenty of repairs that I have to make to my own house when we leave so that it can be rented.  I certainly don’t need to be forking out money on both houses at the same time.  I also got the disclosures from the lender, and it looks like we’re going to have to come up with over $6,000 more in cash to close, in addition to the $2,800 in earnest money that we already paid.  That’s a lot of cash.  And with the impending cost of the move itself, which could range from $5K-$10K based on weight and distance, that leaves us pretty much flat broke.  That’s really not how I wanted to be at the end of this journey.

Ugh.  If you think of it, please say some prayers for us today. We really need everything with buying this house to work out.  If we have to start all over again, then we’re going to have to live apart even longer, and we have to start paying for Steve’s temporary housing on July 1st if we’re not already moved into a house by then.

I will follow up on the weekend with the results of the inspections and whether or not we were able to negotiate the repairs with the seller.  If not, then this contract is dead on Friday.  Back to square one.