Preparing for the home inspection
Once you have impressed the buyers it’s time to impress the home inspector in order to hold the sale together. Here are some easy repairs the homeowner can make before the home inspection :
- Have the furnace cleaned and serviced. (This should be done once a year!)
- Replace or clean dirty furnace filters.
- Prune vegetation away from the house.
- Clean the gutters.
- Repair leaking faucets.
- Install missing covers on electrical switches, outlets and junction boxes.
- Replace all smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors to comply with current standards, make sure alarms have working batteries.
- Replace burned out light bulbs.
- Pull soil 6” away from the siding, basement windows, foundation vents and decks.
- Install 6mil. black plastic vapor barrier in the crawlspace over exposed soil.
- Install earthquake straps on the water heater.
- Finally, building permits are often a subject that arise during the home inspection. Most permits should show up at www.portlandmaps.com if permits were even obtained for your property, but there are sometimes gaps in the online permits and you have to visit the City of Portland Bureau of Development Services in order to get all the available permits of record. In Portland, the records department is right downtown at 1900 SW 4th Ave. A few dollars and a little bit of wait time will produce all the documents that they have on record for your home. Most of these are building permits, but you can sometimes find original house plans and good information about the location of utilities, old septic systems, etc. If a buyer has concerns about unpermitted remodeling on your house, it will be handy to have all available records in hand. For more information: http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bds/