What’s one thing you wish every homeowner knew?
The importance of basic maintenance. Cleaning the gutters, checking the downspouts, and keeping window wells clean. Always try and keep water away from the house. Water is a big potential issue with foundations and basements. We always have to make sure that water is moving away from the foundations.

Why did you become a home inspector?

I like construction, I like doing things with my hands, and I really like the theoretical aspect of construction and home building. This was a good opportunity to get my hands dirty doing the work, but I don’t necessarily have to build anything. I also get to talk to people about their purchases and educate them. There’s lot’s of education involved with this job, I enjoy that part of it too.

Why do you think education is such a big part of what you do?
Clients fall into a bunch of different categories. We have people who are very seasoned owners, they understand 90%- 100% of what I’m talking about. But then you get a lot of particularly first-time home buyers who come from an environment where they’re living in a condominium, someone else takes care of everything, or they’re coming from Mom and Dad’s place where Dad always took care of everything. When you take that step to become a homeowner you have to really understand everything that’s involved with the house, and I try to impress that on my clients as well, especially the first-time homeowners, where they’ve never cleaned a gutter, they’ve never done a lot of yard maintenance or caulked windows or things like that. So I talk about maintenance a lot during my inspections with first-time homebuyers.

Why do you think inspections are important for sellers?
It exposes everything about the house, even the things that sellers may not even want to know about, or in a lot of cases, they don’t know about it because they’ve never thought about it, since they don’t do maintenance. But it lays everything bare, warts and all, this is what the house is. For the most part, most houses are in fairly good condition. We point out areas where some of the maintenance has been negligent over the years, or things could have been done a little bit better. It gives the sellers an opportunity to do a little bit of cleanup as well so it’s not an issue by the time someone looks at the house and wants to make an offer on it.

What are some of the most important lessons you have learned throughout your career?

The importance of listening to people- get to know the client and understand what they expect from the house. If their expectations are in alignment with what reality is going to be for a particular house because every house is going to be a little different. Some places will be very hands-off and turnkey and you just move in. Some places you’re going to need to do renovations, you’re going to need to correct things that haven’t been done properly. And other places, sometimes you just run into a place that’s very intricate technically. When I talk about hands-on in that sense, you’re going to have to understand how the boilers work with the floor heating systems and the air handlers and everything like that. A lot of HVAC sort of concerns. I like to talk to everyone about how these systems work and how they’re going to affect the ability of the house to make their life happy. Dry, safe and warm. We all want our house to be dry, safe and warm, and people have to understand how to do that.