Well, you can easily fix the crack in the brick mortar. But do you have to install a damper? That might be a Big Deal.
Interesting that there is no damper…how often do people have their heat on in San Diego?
@Consolation - we have our heat on in San Diego mostly from late December until March/April. I am in an area that is close to the coast so it doesn’t get as cold as other areas, but most days in the winter we wake up to 50 degree weather. Last winter we had very warm weather this time of year and did not have the heat on much at all. We just run our heater for an hour in the morning and a couple hours in the evening if it is really cold. We like to have fires in our wood burning fireplace at night 2-3 times a week and on those nights we don’t have the heat on. My area is comparable to the temperatures where this house is.
We leave our heat on overnight during the winter at 72 and it kicks in when it needs to. On sunny days like today, the house stays warm most of the evening. No fireplace.
I don’t believe that dampers were common in 1937. I agree that trying to install a damper up inside an old fireplace is a giant pain in the butt. But the chimney inspector recommended a spark arrestor that has a damper installed in it. I have no idea how that works?? don’t know how the top of the chimney automatically opens up when it knows there is a fire going.
We have received the Request for Repairs from the Buyer. Everything is reasonable and I have agreed to let the chimney guy do the spark arrestor and damper and I will pay for it. But there is one big thing on the request that I am not going to do. I’ll discuss after we finish the negotiations… but I have spent all day on the phone with the City and my structural engineer just to make sure I have my language and building code citations correct in my written response.
The main inspection report was 141 pages long. The first 10 pages are CYA boiler plate notes 
lists and lists and lists of things the inspector was not responsible for and was not going to inspect
Wow–that’s a very very LONG report!
How much did that inspection cost?
I’m guessing about $1500… but on a $1.8mil purchase, probably not unreasonable.
I have no idea how much it cost. An interesting side note is that my agent and I did a 3 way call with the inspector that she uses all the time to ask his opinion on the buyer’s request. He looked through the report and was indignant that this inspector was not ‘certified’ by XYZ or whatever. Equivalent to passing some kind of online class and getting a piece of paper.
The guy we used on several of our properties is very thorough and detailed, and he would do things like climb up on the roof and crawl around the attic which a lot of inspectors won’t do, test every single outlet and switch, pop the covers off of the electrical panels to check them out, thorough test of every plumbing fixture, etc. We would get a 40-50 page report with pictures and everything.
It often took him 5+ hours for a building. It can take a long time for a good inspection. Just the foundation alone can take an hour+, a good inspector will check for rot and termite damage in every single joist cavity from the inside and every few feet around the outside.
He charged around $600-700. No idea if he was certified by anyone, didn’t really care.
They use fancy software now to generate the reports, which they basically “write” in real time as they do the inspection, and can immediately include pictures and analysis.
Holy geez that is a loooong report. NRE is probably right. Here, a complete report would be $400-500 and well under 50 pages, but specialists would charge extra… An EIFS (fake stucco) inspection is $1K.
What is fake stucco? I’m not familiar with that material. But on a couple of houses I’ve purchased there was some strange fluffy popcorn type stuff that was sprayed all over the house including the dang eaves and rafters. I just scraped it all off
I just checked our 58 page inspection report and the inspector was certified by one organization and was “XYZ trained” by another. The meat of the report is pages 10 through 49. But the property had an earlier inspection by a buyer who dropped out in escrow and that report was 85 pages. That inspector was not “trained”. (The owner made a lot of repairs between the two reports.)
@coralbrook - it is called EIFS. It is basically STYROFOAM covered with a thin layer of other stuff, like stucco-like material.
We almost made an offer on a house covered in that stuff. Thank goodness the inspector knocked some sense into our heads. If not installed correctly, it can trap moisture and rot the house. The inspector told us horror stories of repairs to the tune of $200K. On one corner, mice got into it, and crumbs of Styrofoam were falling on the dirt below… Eeek. If installed correctly, it is a great insulator. Not an issue in warmer climates, so probably none of that garbage is on the homes in SD. 
I wish my home inspector had been more thorough. It was our first and only home purchase. I noticed discolored carpeting under a bay window and that the floor under the window in a corner had too much “give”. The inspector brushed it off as probably the window having been left open in the rain causing the discolored carpeting. He should have pulled back the carpeting to check underneath.
A few years later we removed the redwood flower boxes on the outside of the house under the bay window and discovered wood rot from moisture and additional damage from carpenter ants. Repairs to rotten wood, floorboards, floor joist, and to add the missing flashing on the roof were $3k.
When we bought our house in Georgia we avoided all stucco houses.There are houses here with the synthetic stucco and it can be a real problem. They only used that stuff on houses starting in the 1980’s so anything older should have the real stuff.
About five years ago we were considering a house that was on a fabulous piece of land but that had been severely neglected. We paid for an inspection before we even put an offer on the house, figuring that if the results were too bad we would walk away. Best $700 we ever spent – the house had just about everything wrong with it!! The person who ultimately bought it tore it down. Unfortunately that wasn’t a possibility for us.
VH, we did the same thing - only last year. It was a great piece of property, but the house was iffy. We figured that pre-paying for inspection was worth it: we would have to pay that money anyway if we made an offer… Best $300 we ever spent, and we got a lot of education about stuff we were not even aware of, like EIFS. That house also was sold as a teardown. I suspect the buyers will replace it with a $3M mansion.
When we sold out first house…we had an inspection done before we listed it. We didn’t give the shoppers a copy, but we did let them know we had this done, what was noted, and what we fixed (we fixed everything the inspection said to fix before we put it on the market…all very minor things).
Of course we knew that any buyer would need their own inspection, but we just didn’t want any snags to hold up or tank a sale.
Thumper, I’m interested in whether your buyer’s inspector found a list of brand new things to fix?