Don’t Let a $4 Lightbulb Haunt Your Inspection Report
If you’re selling, a home inspection can feel like a pop quiz you didn’t study for. Good news: you can study. Most of what lands in a report is small stuff that takes an afternoon to fix. Here’s what I’d knock out first.
Change the dead bulbs. If a light doesn’t turn on, I can’t know if it’s the bulb or the wiring, so it can get written up as a possible electrical problem. A $4 bulb can turn into a line item, and buyers read line items.
Check your smoke and CO alarms. Missing, beeping, or older than the kids? Fresh batteries, updated detectors, and make sure there’s one where there should be. Missing alarms are one of the most common things I see, and also one of the cheapest to fix.
Clear the way. I need to get to the electrical panel, water heater, furnace, attic hatch, and crawlspace. If there’s a pile of holiday decorations in front of the panel, I can’t inspect it, and the report will say so. Buyers tend to read “not inspected” as “scary.”
Turn everything on. Utilities should be on, and that includes the furnace, AC, and water heater. If I can’t test it, I can’t tell the buyer it works.
The furnace filter. It’s the gray fuzzy one that tells me more about a house than you’d think. A clean filter says someone’s been paying attention. A fur coat says the opposite.
Handle the easy exterior stuff. Extend downspouts so water drains away from the house, trim bushes back from the siding, and keep the dirt below the siding line. Water near the foundation is a big deal in my world.
Tighten and tidy. Snug up a loose toilet, fix the drippy faucet, swap the dirty furnace filter, replace cracked outlet covers, and press the test buttons on your GFCI outlets to make sure they work. Any one of them is nothing. Pile enough of them up and the whole house starts to look like it gave up.
Put the pets somewhere safe. I love dogs. I also don’t want one to slip out the door while I’m in the attic.
You don’t need to fix everything, and you don’t need a perfect house. You just don’t want to hand a buyer a list of easy things that can look like big things.
