Home inspection guides

The home inspection checklist for buyers, rebuilt as questions

Built on the ASHI, InterNACHI and Texas REI 7-6 section structures, so the notes you take on the day land in the same place as the inspector's findings.

Printable home inspection checklists that exist as real publications

CPSC Publication 701 and NC Cooperative Extension FCS-436: what each covers, where to get it from its publisher, and what its dates mean for how far you can trust it.

Room by room: what the standards require, and what they exclude

Exterior, roof, attic, crawlspace, the rooms, the garage and the systems: what the standards require inspected and what they exclude, by section number.

What a checklist cannot tell you, and where buyers get hurt

Readily accessible, concealed conditions, and what needs an engineer: the places where a checklist marks something present and an inspector would flag it.

Read the the report overview →

The report

5 guides

How to read it, what the severity words mean, and when it has to arrive.

How to read a home inspection report, starting with the part nobody reads

A method for reading a report: not-inspected entries first, then the summary page, the markers and the recommendation verbs, with a regulator's quality checklist.

The severity words in your report are not standardized — and two of them contradict each other

Texas, Wisconsin, InterNACHI, Illinois, Tennessee, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Oregon each define report severity differently. Two of the definitions are opposites.

What counts as a material defect — and why age, by itself, does not

The definition quoted in full, including the exclusion everyone skips, the state that legislates the opposite, and what both mean when you ask a seller to replace something.

When do you get the inspection report? In most states, whenever your agreement says

Illinois says two business days, North Carolina three, Massachusetts says only timely, and most states say nothing. Plus the Ohio rule everybody misreads.

One state prescribes the report form itself. Seven prescribe only what goes in it.

Texas prescribes REI 7-6. Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Oregon, Massachusetts and Kentucky prescribe contents only, and Louisiana prescribes nothing at all.

Read the the inspection day overview →

The inspection day

4 guides

How long it takes, who attends, and what an inspector may not determine.

How long does a home inspection take? No primary source says

We searched the federal forms, both national standards and eight state rulebooks for a stated inspection duration. None gives one. Massachusetts documents it instead.

Should you attend the home inspection? Yes — though almost no rule says so

Two institutional documents recommend attending and no standard of practice addresses it. What attending gets you, when to arrive, and what not to do while you are there.

What an inspector may not determine — and the federal form that disagrees

The scope boundary with citations: no code compliance, no engineering, nothing concealed, no life expectancy — plus the HUD form that contradicts both national standards.

What happens during a home inspection, and what stops one

The procedural walk-through built from the standards: what the inspector does, in what order, what has to be on and reachable, and who carries the gap when it is not.