Person

What I Find, and Why It Is Always the Same Six Things

SN Salvatore Nunez

Four hundred inspections a year in this city and the findings cluster hard. San Antonio sits on expansive clay, builds on post tension slabs, puts the air handler in a 60 degree attic, and grew fast enough in the 2000s that a lot of corners got cut with nobody watching. This is a plain account of what actually turns up, with the numbers from my own reports, so buyers know what to look for and so builders know somebody is counting.

01 The Foundation, Which Is Most of It

Expansive clay moves five to eight centimetres between a wet spring and a dry August. Roughly a third of the houses I inspect show movement worth writing up, and a handful every year show damage somebody caused deliberately.

Post tension tendons and the plumber with a jackhammer

A slab leak repair done without the tendon plan is the single most expensive defect I find, and it is invisible from the surface once the patch is finished and the floor goes back down.

A post tension slab is held in compression by steel cables stressed to around 33,000 pounds each. Cut one and that part of the slab loses its compression and starts behaving like unreinforced concrete over soil that moves eight centimetres a year. I find one or two a year. Every time, the story is the same: slab leak, plumber cut through the slab to reach the line, patched it, nobody told the next buyer. The tells are a rectangular patch in the slab visible from the crawl of a floor covering change, a diagonal crack running off a corner of that patch, and a measurable drop on the level within about two metres of it. If you own a post tension slab: the tendon plan is usually taped inside the electrical panel door or on file with the builder. Nobody cuts your slab without it. A tunnel under the slab costs more than cutting through it and it is cheaper than what a cut tendon costs to repair.

How I decide whether movement is a problem

Not every cracked wall is a foundation problem and not every level floor is fine. I use elevation readings, crack pattern and door operation together, and I say in the report which of the three drove my opinion.

Three inputs, and no one of them decides on its own. Elevation. I run a four foot level across the slab in a grid and use a laser where the readings suggest something. Fifteen to twenty millimetres of differential across a room gets my attention. Over thirty and I am recommending an engineer regardless of what the walls look like. Crack pattern. Vertical hairlines over a door header in a house built in 2004 are usually shrinkage and drying. Diagonal cracks running from a window corner up toward the ceiling, especially with displacement so you can feel a lip with your thumbnail, are movement. Stair stepping in a brick veneer at a corner is movement. Door and window operation. Doors that bind at the top corner on the same side of the house as the low elevation reading is three pieces of evidence agreeing. When those three agree, I recommend an engineer and I write down which reading made me do it. When they disagree, I say that too. Uncertainty in a report is honest, but only if you explain where it comes from.
02 Attics, HVAC and the Ceiling That Falls In

Putting the air handler above your drywall in a climate like this one is a decision somebody made to save floor space. It works fine right up until the primary drain clogs, which it will.

The secondary pan and the float switch

An attic air handler needs a secondary drain pan under it and a float switch that kills the unit when that pan fills. I find one or both missing or disconnected on something like a fifth of the houses I inspect.

Here is the sequence. The primary condensate drain clogs, which happens because of algae and because nobody has ever poured anything down it. Condensate backs up. In a properly installed system it overflows into the secondary pan, the float switch in that pan senses water and shuts the unit down, and you notice because the air conditioning stopped in August. Annoying, cheap. When the pan is missing, or rusted through, or the float switch was disconnected by somebody who got tired of the unit shutting off, the water goes straight through the drywall. I have seen a ceiling come down into a nursery. What I check: pan present, correct size, no corrosion, drain line from the pan routed to a visible location such as over a window so you see it dripping, float switch present and wired. Cost to fix all of it: usually under 400 dollars. Cost of the ceiling: several thousand plus whatever the insurance adjuster argues about.

Ducts, insulation and the cable installer

Attic temperatures here hit 60 degrees Celsius. A disconnected duct boot or insulation flattened by somebody crawling to run a wire costs real money every month and shows up clearly on the thermal camera.

Two findings on nearly every attic and they are related, because both are caused by people crawling around up there after the house was finished. Disconnected or partially disconnected duct boots. A flex duct pulls off the boot at the ceiling register, usually because somebody used it as a handhold. Now you are air conditioning your attic. On the thermal scan from inside the room it shows as a register that is barely cooler than the ceiling around it. Flattened and displaced insulation. Blown insulation is rated at a depth. Crawl through it and it compresses to nothing along your path, and the path always runs to wherever the cable or the satellite installer needed to be. Thermal scan from inside shows it as stripes across the ceiling. Neither is a safety issue and neither will kill a deal. Both are on my monitor list with a note about what it costs to fix, which for the insulation is usually a couple of hundred dollars of blown material and an afternoon.
03 What Twelve Years of Framing Taught Me to Look For

Production framing runs to a schedule. When the schedule slips, specific things get skipped in a specific order, and they are hidden behind drywall by Monday.

The Friday afternoon list

Fire blocking, hangers, and notching in load bearing members. These are the three that go first when a crew is behind, because none of them are visible once the rock is up.

I am not accusing anyone. I framed for twelve years and I know what the pressure feels like when the drywall truck is booked for Monday morning and you are half a day behind. Fire blocking in the wall cavities at floor lines and in soffits over cabinets. Invisible afterwards, and it is what stops a fire in a wall from reaching the attic in ninety seconds. Joist hangers, or rather the nails in them. A hanger installed with two nails instead of ten looks identical from three metres away and carries a fraction of the load. I count nails on hangers. Notching and boring. A plumber or an electrician needs a pipe through a joist and cuts where it is convenient rather than where the code permits. A 50mm notch in the bottom of a floor joist at midspan is a joist that is now half a joist. On a finished house I cannot see any of this, which is exactly why I push people toward a pre drywall inspection when they are building. One visit, and it is the visit that pays for itself.

A full report from a 1998 house on the north side, 31 pages, so you can see how I write findings, how the safety and monitor tiers work, and what the one page summary for your agent looks like.

🔗Sample report, real inspection, address removednunezinspectionworks.com↗