What 20+ Years in Construction Catches That a Checklist Doesn’t

A home inspection checklist can be taught in a weekend course. Knowing what’s actually wrong when you’re standing under a deck, looking at a ledger board, takes longer than that. A lot longer.

I spent over 20 years doing construction before I ever picked up an inspection tool. Bath and kitchen remodels, deck design and builds, general residential repairs. That background doesn’t replace the license or the standards of practice. It changes what I notice while I’m following them.

The deck story

Deck collapses aren’t rare the way people think they are. Most of the time it comes down to one thing: the ledger board, the piece that attaches the deck to the house, wasn’t lag-bolted and flashed the way it should’ve been. Sometimes it’s nailed instead of bolted. Sometimes there’s no flashing at all, so water gets behind the board for years and rots it from the inside where you can’t see it from the yard.

A checklist tells you to look at the deck. It doesn’t tell you what a properly flashed ledger board looks like versus one that’s about to fail, because that’s not something you learn from a checklist. I’ve built decks. I know what the connection is supposed to look like before I ever crouch down to check one, and I know exactly where the rot hides when it’s been done wrong.

Framing that’s been “fixed” before

Old repairs get hidden fast. Someone jacks up a sagging floor, throws in a support post that’s not resting on a proper footing, and calls it done. From a normal walkthrough, it looks fine. The floor doesn’t sag anymore.

I’ve done enough of these repairs myself to know what a proper footing looks like under a support post, and what it looks like when someone poured a slab too thin, or just set the post straight on dirt. That’s the kind of thing that gets missed when the only frame of reference is whether the floor feels level now.

The remodel that’s hiding something

Fresh paint and new fixtures make a house feel safe. Sometimes that’s exactly the problem.

I’ve walked into homes where a bathroom got fully redone right before it went on the market. New tile, new vanity, looks great. Underneath, if you know what a properly waterproofed shower pan looks like because you’ve built a few, you can tell in about thirty seconds whether this one was done right or just covered up fast to sell the house. A general inspector without that background is working from the same visual cues a buyer would use: it looks new, so it must be fine. I’m working from having done the job myself, badly the first few times, until I learned what actually holds up.

What this means when you’re hiring someone

Rushing through a house and flagging every hairline crack like it’s a crisis doesn’t protect you. It just makes the report harder to trust. The real value is knowing the difference between a cosmetic crack and a structural one, between a deck that’s fine and one that’s a few winters from failing, and being able to explain that difference in plain language.

That’s the whole reason the construction background matters here. It makes the inspection more accurate.

Schedule with someone who’s actually done the work

If you’re buying a home in the Triangle, ask your inspector what they did before they were an inspector. It’s a fair question, and the answer tells you something a license number alone doesn’t.

Every inspection I do includes free drone roof imaging and infrared thermal scanning, and reports come back within 24 hours. Schedule online or call, and I’ll walk the property with the same eye I’d use on my own house.