They accepted our offer, and now the inspection

Having an offer accepted is much like getting that date with someone way out of your league you never thought you’d land. You stumble up drunk and brave, lay down some incredibly stupid line – which sounds real good when you’re loaded. You even turn around and give a wink and a thumbs up to your friends in an attempt to cushion the impending crash and burn. But then he or she turns to you, looks you up and down and says, “Let’s have dinner, and then sex.”

Well, crap. Now what? Then you really have to dress nice. You have to shave, or, wax – the big wax. You have to talk, and even be interesting. You have to eat without spitting chunks of food across the table. And then you have to get through the sex and then the days afterward going through it in your head wondering if it all went down right.

Then you meet a few friends, there’s speculation, then interrogations, and onto the biggie, an inspection. And there are any number of unforeseen things that can derail the future.

So, yeah, we had the inspection today. Not a pre inspection, but the official on-the-record inspection. My two big concerns? The house’s structure, and the electrical.


The structure is a given. I don’t want the place falling down. The good news is that the house was built in 1903, when we had lumber to burn, and back when builders really dried the wood, instead of throwing up wet wood that continues to warp with age. The wood I saw looks like the type of stuff churches are built of, and big animal-hauling arks – beams and posts and boards. LUMBER, not sticks and fiberboard.


Now from the first day I saw the guts of this house, I noticed some structural additions around the perimeter in the basement. I knew right away it was added to support something, but didn’t know exactly why.

Bonnie, the inspector, found it. Between the foundation and the walls of any house is a “sill,” which sits on the foundation, and to which posts and studs attach. Today’s codes require sills to be pressure treated, or made of a bug resistant wood like cedar, to keep bugs from eating it and moisture from destroying it. In 1903 there were no codes, and even if there were, 105 years is 105 years. The wood sill has dry rot, and started turning to dust under the pressure. In an effort to lift and support the house around the perimeter, someone braced it with treated wood and new cement.


The big question . . . is that kosher? In the case of a seismic event, like an earthquake, or, say, an earthquake, we don’t want the perimeter cement to move one direction, and the house to move another. So we have to get a structural engineer down there to take a look.


As for electrical, let’s take my friend Doug. His house was built in the 50’s, I guess, in the trendy neighborhood of Eastern Venice Beach. I remember the day he threw out his microwave because he thought it was fried. But then something fried behind the fridge, which fried something else, and Doug started tripping.

Doug had an electrician come take a look, who scared the crap out of Doug.

“Holy crap! My house almost burned down!” he said as I tried coaxing him to go surfing. “Hell no, I have to rewire the house!”

It had been a long time since I’d seen anyone shock themselves by sticking a screwdriver into a socket, but leave it to Doug to do exactly that, and thank God it happened while I was there. Maybe if it had been my wife, or my downstairs neighbor, I wouldn’t have laughed so hard. But it was Doug, and so I had to take a good 20 minutes to enjoy that.


A week or so later Doug had his house rewired. Seeing the fried and charred wires melted into his electric panel made a believer out of Doug, and so motivated him to fish and pull and crawl and wiggle and cap and screw and at one point even ask for help from Peter, our Austrian friend, and an electrical engineer. Wires were doubled up, mystery wires went nowhere, wall outlets were bombs waiting to happen, and he fixed it.

So, I was very concerned about this electrical system. Tim, our realtor, had already pointed out the “pole and tube,” or “tube and pulley,” or “post and hanger” wiring is still common in old houses, and warned us before we even went to the house that it would probably be there. (Bonnie, the inspector, even mentioned a few times that “plug and spark” or whatever, chases a lot of people away from buying perfectly good houses.)


The kitchen wiring is new, and the bathrooms are new, but for the most part the house’s electrical system looked rigged by Thomas Edison himself. Now, in theory it works. Positive to negative and zap, lights go on and toasters toast. But it lacks the all important ground element, or that third prong. And it looks like some old telegraph set up, missing only that lone Indian with his ear pressed up against the pole listening to the “Talking Wire.”

But the wiring that’s there is in great shape for what it is. The electric panel, or the switchboard as I improperly call it, is the important part. It’s the nerve center of the operation, and it is, I’m told, fine, at 125 amps. There are a lot of wires running about, and consists of a mixture of old and new. But it isn’t Doug’s nightmare of a bomb ready to blow, and we can replace it when we get around to it.

So, sturdy as gorilla bones and safe - that’s fine by me. Now we’re waiting on getting a structural engineer in there to take a look. If he signs off, then I’m good.

We’ll see.