Saturday, June 25, 2011

Inspecting with your own Inspector

There have been some questions swirling about the blogging community about hiring your own inspector, and we discussed this at our pre-construction meeting this week so I thought I would share while I was thinking about it.

When we asked about bringing in our own inspector, our PM was quick to point out that the county and their inspectors are really strict, much more so than in neighboring counties.  I don't disagree, but if someone is having a bad day, or hates their boss, things can still get missed, you know?  However, he said we are welcome to hire our own inspector for our own peace of mind.  We said we were interested in bringing someone in for the pre-drywall, and then right before closing.  PM said that was fine, but asked that a separate time be arranged for a visit with the inspector, to not interfere with our pre-drywall and final inspections with him.  I guess that's fair - he wants to deal with the buyer one on one.  We can then deal with the inspector.  He also hinted at some of the things that I've seen others of you say - basically, that if a code issue is found, they would fix it and everything else would be discretionary. 

So, while they WILL allow us to have our own inspector, he didn't promise that anything the inspector found would be fixed.  I'm sure they would prefer to not deal with it, but, too bad.  For a few hundred dollars, I can buy total (well almost) peace of mind, and I'm going to do it.  I just hope that they won't find anything of consequence.

We'll be going out to the house hole later today and I'll have some more pictures to share!

4 comments:

  1. We were pretty much told it was WELCOMED, but unless something was against code, they were not obligated to fix it. We did have a few "oops" that were not up to code, and then a few minor things, all of which our PM took care of.

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  2. Same for us...no problem having inspector...do it a couple of days before our scheduled inspections(fine with me).

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  3. As you have probably read, our PM was not as welcoming at first; however, recently the PM has become more accepting to allowing us to bring in our own home inspector during the pre-drywall and final inspection. We plan to follow-up with our RH sales rep today to express our disappointment on how the issue was handled while she was on vacation last week. There was a lot of unnecessary drama. Our PM also explained that RH is not obligated to fix anything that our inspector found unless it is not up to code or RH standards.

    We received a comment (we believe from Noey) that if we truly thinks something should be fixed and RH decides to not fix it, we can threaten to walk away from the deal entirely or if necessary we could seek legal action. However, it would have to be something major and we sure hope it doesn't have to come to that.

    Thanks for sharing and best wishes during the building process.

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  4. HW - it really sucks that you had the kind of drama that you had with this issue, especially because it seems that the rest of us had gotten a much different answer than you did. I'm really glad you got it straightened out, and hope that people just getting into this find our blogs and find it useful!

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