Heart Check

By Bill
Published on July 31st, 2008

Have you ever wondered what kind of shape your heart is in? Well I have a home inspectors way to find out.

I followed this procedure myself and was quite pleased to learn that my heart and my nerves were in very good condition. Before you try this be warned you could also be a headline! “Home Inspector Found Under A Home With Face Frozen In Horror” or “Deceased Home Inspector Found Under A Home”

Here’s what you’ll need,

One home with a crawlspace, preferably a nice low crawlspace

One nice warm Tyvec suit or just some thick cotton coveralls

One good hat

One pair of thick gloves

One strong flashlight

One backup flashlight

One limb or stick about three feet long

One dust mask or respirator if you’re really serious

One digital camera

Two knee pads

Oh and one or two snakes, cats, large rats, raccoons or whatever will get your attention

This is the way I did it, feel free to modify as desired!

I suited up with my white suit, hat, knee pads and gloves. My camera was on my side and my spare light in my back pocket. Both inside of my suit. I grabbed a stick, knocked down all of the spider webs I could reach and headed into the unknown. This crawlspace was a little low so I wriggled along for about ten minutes. As I came to air ducts there were nice little depressions in the dirt so I used those to wriggle under and keep going. After about fifteen minutes of wriggling along on my stomach in a sweat suit, I made it to the front of the home. This area was a few feet high and allowed for some good crawling.

It was about this point that I discovered a couple of plumbing leaks. Huffing and puffing a little, I dug out the camera and documented my finds. Sitting up to put my camera away caused another interesting find to drop down from the insulation. It was a six foot long snake skin that looked like it crawled in here rather recently.

In situations like this it seams like time slows down and different parts of your body act independently. My eyes darted around as if not sure where to focus as my hand with the light tried in vain to follow. While that went on, my adrenal gland knew exactly what to do and added a little go juice to my blood. I eased over to check out the side wall as my heart picked up the pace and my lungs attempted to supply needed oxygen.

Inspector blindness should be mentioned here. This typically happens when an inspector is so focused and convinced on what they will see that they overlook something else.

I eased my head up near the floor to take a close look for moisture damage. As I did my hyped up senses were on the alert for the previous owner of that used skin. Just as I crawled past a block pier a huge orange cat blasted out of nowhere and bounced off my back. One side of my brain took a brief moment to convince the other that there were no orange furry snakes while my arms and legs simply went into autoflail. In the meantime my adrenal gland kicked in with a few more drops of go juice. I yelled a few choice words and rolled over onto the ground expecting to have the big one at any moment.

Oh but that was not to be! I took a short quiet break, re focussed on the inspection at hand, and completed my inspection.

After I crawled back out, I explained to the homeowner that I made sure to chase their cat out of the crawlspace.

If you don’t think it’s fun, you have the wrong job!

Bill Chester


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