What Goes Into Preparing for an Inspection?

A twitter post (I guess its X now) by @leo_szac got me to thinking - dangerous habit, that it is - about how I prep when I leave my local area to inspect a luxury home or commercial site elsewhere. Nothing changes in the inspection process.

What changes dramatically are the environmentally conditions, soil conditions, and building practices of another region.

When I inspect a hotel in West Yellowstone, the soils are far different than I see when I do a multi-million dollar log home on the Olympic Peninsula or historic hotel in Moscow, Idaho.

Moscow is in my local region. I know that like the back of my hand. On new construction, I can predict what defects will be built into a home before I get there.

You Can’t the Soils -But They Make a Difference

Commercial property I inspected in Montana. Hours of prep work before I even agreed to the contractr.

When I prep for another region, the very first thing I look at are the geological data on soil structures because the bones of a structure must be good and that starts with a solid foundation. The loess of the Palouse is very different than around Yellowstone which is a very stony sandy loam. The Inland Northwest and western Washington have alluvial soils but, even there, there are differences as Seattle has outwash from melting glaciers and Coeur d'Alene soils are much closer to base rock.

Environmentally, rainfall on the Olympic Peninsula is non-stop as befits a rainforest. I live in the Lewis-Clark valley, a desert. I have literally left an inspection on the peninsula where it was 50 degrees and raining and come home to sunny skies and 100+ degree temperatures. Which area do you suspect has much higher wood-destroying fungal growth?

In terms of building practices, the materials don't change much - but the mistakes that the contractors make, do. My joke is that I go visit other regions to visit a whole new inventory of defects.

All this prep is a lot of work before I ever hit a job site but utterly critical to get things right on my end for my clients. I know, all this is six kinds of nerdy. Back to Leo's point. Your local pro in the specific market will likely have a much better handle on that market than someone who helicopter's in from Timbuktu.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I can think of at least one nerdy inspector who is.