Home Buyer's Biggest Fears

From spooky history to surprise expenses, buying a home can be SCARY! The experience of buying a home is so fraught with emotion. For many, it’s the biggest and most important investment you’ll ever make. The dream of home ownership is rooted in what it means to be an adult in America. What if it burns down?

I don’t care who you are, fire is scary. In this house, our inspector uncovered evidence of a previous fire that is honestly pretty creepy. Lightning had struck the panel box causing a fire that had spread through the house. Most evidence of the fire had been repaired and replaced except for some charring in the attic and the burn marks from the lightning: What if the foundation collapses?

Foundation repair is scary because it’s expensive and disruptive and can cause all kinds of collateral repair/replacement. Here’s a larger than normal deflection crack: What if the house is infested with rats or spiders or killer wasps?

Bugs and rodents are scary! In this house, the inspector found more than 20 active wasp nests around the exterior of the house and more in the attic. And this one is just mean: What might be lurking under the house?

Crawl spaces are scary. The scariest thing the owner and original Green Scene Home Inspector ever found in a crawl space was a live WWII artillery shell. Another Inspector told me he inspected a home where not one, but TWO murders had taken place, and said he felt creeped out the whole time. This Inspector turned around a found he had a buddy in the crawl space with him. The moral of the story is, no matter how bad a house is, it could always be worse: