You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The inspection report.
Stunning. Illuminating. Disappointing.
When I pull up to my home in the little subdivision, sometimes it smiles at me. Sometimes it frowns.
The red brick house is cute, but it needs a face lift.
The roof is new, so is the water heater.
But there are many signs of wear and tear.
Like an aging boxer, it sags a little, stumbles a little, it doesn’t rope a dope like it once did.
I’m looking around the house and the grass is weedy, there are cracks in the driveway, the wood is so mushy, in spots you can poke your thumb through it.
If I don’t look too hard at anything for too long, it reminds me of a ginger bread house. But if I stare too long in any one direction, little problems jump out at you.
I want the house to look like a ginger bread house. I want to be a ginger bread man and look at the little house through my rose-colored glasses.
And I get to do that.
But I’m a dreamer.
The home inspector man is a stoic investigator.
He doesn’t care about ginger bread dreams. He cares about the process.
Armed with a microscope and a laser pointer, he is a residential scientist.
The home inspection took a little over two hours.
The middle-aged man was armed with heat sensors and a digital camera.
He crawled under the house, he went into the attic, he sniffed around the fence in the back yard.
I tried to make small talk with the inspector man.
“The house has always been good to me,” I say. “never given me any real trouble,” I add.
He chuckles and looks at the filter of the HVAC unit like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes.
“Just put a new roof on 2 years ago,” I say.
The middle-aged man smiles, keeping his secret, like this is the world series of poker.
He runs up the stairs. He comes down the stairs. He runs the dishwasher, the garbage disposal then the sink faucet.
For two hours, he roams through my home like the plague.
Finally he is done.
I pay him and he says; “I’ll send you the report in a few days.”
Any major issues?
He smiles.
“It will be in the report,” he says leaving.
A few days later, I get the report. It’s long. It’s very long.
27 pages long, with almost that many photos of flaws and cracks and irregularities.
Each room in the house is a chapter in this home inspection war and peace.
Each room has sub categories of inspection infractions.
A bedroom lists a wobbly ceiling fan, incorrect door spacing and foggy windows.
Bathrooms consist of toilets that flush slowly and sink stoppers that don’t stop.
A hallway has an electrical switch with wrong polarity. I don’t even know what that is.
So many little things that can go wrong and apparently over a home’s lifetime have gone wrong.
I see the problems, but individually, they don’t bother me.
Oh there’s that crack. Oh there’s that sink stopper that doesn’t stop.
Individually, nothing really matters that much.
But when they are all sprinkled into the same report, it gets your attention.
The report indicates black specks on a board in a crawl space. Is that mold? The report seems to think so.
There’s a crack in the ceiling. Is that a simple patch or a structural breech?
Possible mold and termites and fixtures and light bulbs and stoppers that don’t stop.
I am looking at a verbose check list that is a lot to swallow.
For a gingerbread man, I am choking on too much gingivitis.
When I look at the entire check list it is overwhelming.
It feels like trying to eat an entire steak in a single bite.
I try and chew the report a little bit at a time.
When I do that? It’s a bit more manageable.
It indicates there’s a lot of ticky tack repairs to consider.
Window seals blown.
Buy new windows.
I can do that.
The light in the microwave is out.
Buy a new bulb.
That’s easy.
The fence has holes.
By some boards.
Simple.
The hose spigot doesn’t sit flush against the bricks.
Seal it.
I can’t do that, but I know someone who can.
OMG
So many things to fix.
When you look at the 27 page report, you wonder if you are living in a home or a broken down dumpster.
As I read this report, I could be discouraged. But really, I’m not.
It’s just stuff. And stuff can always be fixed if you put your mind to fixing stuff.
A report of this nature tends to feel like the glass is half empty.
But I am not a glass is half empty kind of guy.
I will think about this report and prioritize.
I will decide what needs my attention and what can slide for now.
The inspector piled all the lab specimens into one petri dish.
No wonder it looks like the plague.
But if you go slow, and just take a problem at a time, what seems like Ebola, is really no more problematic than the common cold.
Ginger Bread houses can always be fixed.
Life’s Crazy™