SonOfSwamp

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Sure. I'd strongly support your leading the way with helpfulness, gentle words for a gentle readership. Everybody likes gentle. Ironically, you're accusing me -- in a sort of backhanded passive-agressive ad-hominem and ungentlemanly kind of way -- of the polar opposite of smarminess. Smarmy is the Eddie Haskell thing. (Gee, your frock is most becoming, Mrs. Cleaver.) In the context of an HI web board, I'm curmugdeonly, a crosspatch. Since I was about 12, I've followed a creed of eliminating the screwups first, then shining up the things that need polishing. In my bandleader role, my rule was, "First, we take out all the parts that suck." It's not that I'm aiming to be right all the time. (Well, actually, I am aiming for that. Who isn't?) Anyhow, being right or wrong takes care of itself. When I'm right, I'm right. Clearly, I'm not right for this room. Please have one of the non-smarmy brethren (they know who they are) let me know when the HI community is perfect, and comprises only sweet and gentle folk who tread gently on the good earth. WJ

Not that I'd even bring it up, but hidden cameras and microphones come to mind... WJ

I think I created the Madison, WI mistake. I went to the paper's website, and thought I was looking at a Madison, WI paper. Anyhow, looks like Holleran is in the muckraking (and I mean that in a good way) business. WJ

The same IR cameras HIs use are used to scan horses. Looky here: http://equineir.com/ WJ

Seems the reporter, Kelly Holleran, is an investigative reporter for a Madison, WI newspaper. Like so many "journalists" these days, Ms. Holleran seems to be working at Blogger Level. Hard to find a competent editor these days... Of course, I could be wrong, WJ

Pardon my saying so, but in my humble experience, there are just too many HIs who don't have the skillset to do a decent job. I've spent the last few years reading nonsensical reports, listening to garbled tales and outright lies, and seeing one HI brought into the courtroom straight from the drunk tank, and in chains to boot. (That leaves an impression!) It is devilishly hard to find competent HIs. To paraphrase brother Katen, it seems that many if not most HIs learn everything they know by reading boilerplate in canned HI software. Here's an example of high risk: Here in assbackwards Tennessee, the RE lobby made dang sure (via the licensing rules & regs) that every HI is set up for a lawsuit. TN HIs have to have E&O. If an HI makes one little mistake, or if some muleheaded customer just thinks he made a mistake, his deductible and his premiums go up and stay up. It would help if there were a legitimate HI knowledge base. Something other than the usual folklore. Thirty-plus years of "professional" HI work, and no knowledge base yet... WJ

Looks like whimsy to me. Somebody took a little piece of trim off a wood piece, then turned it into a mini-mantel. Of course, I could be wrong, WJ

Well stated. WJ

If you don't mind me asking, what's a leader in this context? WJ

Those are June Bugs. I've seen those bugs ever since I was a kid, from South Carolina to Tennessee. Best I know, they eat no wood. The feed on leaves, at night. They will fly into a house if a window or door is left open. The grubs live underground for 2 - 3 years. They do some harm to trees and shrubs. I say don't call 'em wood destroying insects, because you'd likely be dead wrong. But don't go by me. I'm not a bug man. WJ

I surely haven't studied PV panels, but it seems to me that it would be lest costly, and more practical, to put such panels not on roofs, but on standalone decks that don't have plumbing vents, attic vents and chimneys, etc. sticking up through them. WJ

My humble experience is that nasty smells in a house either go away eventually, or they get so bad that anybody can find the source. WJ

Is Illustrated Home still available? Buy the CD, and you'll have just about every useful graphic imaginable. For a while, CodeCheck sold their graphics. Don't know if they still do. FWIW, the CodeCheck graphics, besides being useful, are enjoyable. Finally, this: Don't go by me, but I think that building codes are now in the public domain. Google "building codes public domain." Oh, and it's copyright. Trust me on this one. WJ

Maybe it's just me, but I've always taken the term "visual inspection" to be pretty dang vague and nebulous. Does it mean, "pertaining to anything a baby could see with one rheumy eye half open?" Does it mean, "look but don't touch?" If one wants to rely on the term "visual inspection" to keep himself out of trouble, I think he'd do well to go into detail about what it means in the context of an agreement. WJ

Two things come to mind: 1. In my humble experience, every engineer who hired me to do his home inspection disclosed on the front end that he knew nothing about doing a home inspection. 2. I'd be willing to bet, well, fifty cents, that all written communication in this deal was somewhere close to nonsensical. Show me an engineering firm that can create a semi-understandable document, let alone a bulletproof contract. WJ

Ditto Richard. My co-inspector and I were always hired before anybody called to book an inspection. Best I could tell, the folks who wanted us to do their inspection had just one criterion: I want those guys. FWIW, we bypassed RE referrals by running a perpetual ad in the local alternative newsweekly; and, 50,000 papers were printed each week with the ad and my little column. WJ

I can't cite chapter & verse right now, but the workspace/walkway has been required for quite a while. This is one of those common-sense things. One need not necessarily cite the code. But it's always a good idea to cite a reputable source. You can buy the 1992 CABO for 29 bucks: http://www.iccsafe.org/e/prodshow.html? ... pq9778%7C2 WJ

FWIW, I've seen old cotton batt insulation, pretty much all of it in 1930s houses. It looks like, well, cotton. WJ

We usually did one at 9:30AM (we got there early; expected clients at 9:30). Then we'd get lunch and start another job around 1:00PM. We were usually done and I was home by 4:30 - 5:00. Bear in mind that there were two of us, and we worked mostly in town, which meant short drives. Exception: Co-inspector Rick drove an hour into town and an hour back. Didn't work weekends. Got a little insulted if/when people asked. Told 'em something like, "This is America. We work Monday through Friday. A man has to cut the grass and pet his dog sometime." WJ

Now that's funny. WJ

I paged through some of his columns. One has an editor scolding him for being "anti-reeltor." The editor was unhappy because Stone was costing him money in ad sales. Now that's shameful. An editor picks up a guy's (boring as gruel) column, then tell him he needs to get on board with the ad sales at a pissant paper. Life In Hell... Thank gawd, I never had that problem. Really, who would read a lame HI column? (Well, just for today, me I guess.) Minor rant: The HI profession produces no worthwhile press. We, taken as a breed, are painfully boring and off all radars that aren't manned by the "stakeholders." Almost every website has the same lame copy (definition of inspection, biggest investment, blah, blah). Same with brochures. We write like bureaucrats. Our boilerplate would bore boilerplate to death. We've mixed up trades, observation, reporting, invented ethics and invented spellings. As brother Les has pointed out, many of us don't really know what the job entails. And we continue to do the job the same way we've been doing it for 30+ years. By some crazy luck, I decided to promote my business by creating a newsletter that entertained and informed, and made no sales pitch. It worked for me. IMHO, HI work is just about as good as the HI makes it. It's a personality gig. If customers like you, you'll get work. If customers don't like you, well, it's back to the Tilt-A-Whirl. WJ

Well, in this column, after he gets done smacking the HI in question upside the head for not taking a roof walk (without knowing what the HI actually did/said/wrote), Stone does say that there are alternative methods for roof research, such as looking from a ladder, looking through binoculars, etc. (He didn't mention simply looking up at a ceiling or roof deck, or looking out dormer windows...) And, he takes the complaining homeowner's word as gospel, as if naive homeowners are perfect reporters... Stone's "voice", IMHO, carries more than a little frustration. He smacks the whole HI profession upside the head when he gets a chance. In this regard, I feel his pain. We've got some honest and conscientious geniuses in the HI biz; that's good. But our little niche gig also holds many HIs who couldn't pass a middle-school writing assignment, let alone a GED. What else can Stone say, if he wants to stay anywhere near the truth? WJ