AKAKBUCK;1880485; said:
Ok, at this point, it's pretty easy...
Get a reputable home inspector and ask HIM all the questions on here.
Yup.
My house was built in 1942. Here's my stories:
The upstairs toilet wasn't standard. (New toilet didn't match existing floor bolt positions.)
No insulation. Walls are really cold in the winter.
Poor insulation in attic. That's something I should be able to fix - I'm lazy.
Some water pipes are filled with gunk.
We had a new basement system installed last year. They found some cracked/broken drain pipes under the basement.
Before I finished the basement, the "livable" side had 1 outlet. (I've added a bunch.)
None of the outlets in the house were grounded.
The circuit breaker box was poorly labeled, and some outlets don't match where they should be. For instance, one breaker was labeled "basement". I noticed when tearing out the old wires that some wires went up through the floor of the first floor. Sure enough, there's an outlet in the living room that is on the breaker for the basement. Who knows what else is different.
Maybe my all-time favorite: I was installing a lamp post in the front of my house last summer, and figured the easiest thing to do would be to wire it into the existing circuit to the garage. I know - not a very "engineerically sound" way to do it, but if I can invent words like "engineerically", I can wire a lamp post however I want. I get the wire all set up, power is off, etc. My new wire is 3-conductor, colored black, white, and bare. The wire in the outlet in the garage is black, white, and green. So, I stupidly connect black to black, white to white, and bare to green. The lamp doesn't work. I go back and find out that the green was the hot wire, and the black was the ground wire. I should have noticed that the black wire goes down to the ground rod, but still, it was a bit of a surprise. I'm glad I didn't let anyone touch the lamp post while the power was on. Whoever buys the house next is going to be very surprised to see what looks like the hot wire connected to my ground wire.