The Home Buyer's Manual · 20 chapters
Not in the kitchen. In an eight-inch strip of soil where the ground meets the wall, in the date stamped inside a grey box nobody opens, and in the order you walk the rooms. This is a book about looking at that, written by a man who did it for a living and no longer sells anything to anyone.
An estate agent is paid at the closing table. That is not a wicked thing, it is simply how the work is arranged — but it means the man who tells you the truth about a house is telling it against his own week. An inspector is paid the same fee whether the house is sound or rotten. That single fact is the whole of the authority in this book.
It stops where the trade stops. There is a line past which the correct instruction is put the torch down and telephone somebody this week, and knowing exactly where that line sits is most of what the job teaches. The book takes you up to it and then says so, plainly, every single time.
It is not a repair manual, and it is not a verdict on your house. Nobody here has seen your house. What it gives you is a way of looking — and the price tag attached to each thing you find.
In the book
Not in the book
From chapter two — the eight inches where the money lives
In October of 2004 I inspected a nine year old house in central Ohio for a woman named Della Prater, sixty-one, a retired school secretary, buying alone and moving four hundred miles to be near her grandchildren. She had a folder with her, and in it, laminated, the receipt for nine thousand dollars of basement waterproofing the sellers had paid for three years earlier. She showed it to me the way you show somebody a clean bill of health.
The rain came at about eleven. Before it did I had knelt at the back left corner with a tape measure and found what I was going to find. The mulch was heaped against the wall like a pillow, and when I pushed it back the bottom edge of the siding was under the soil by an inch and a half. Nobody had done that on purpose. Somebody had put a wheelbarrow of mulch on that bed every spring for nine years, and mulch does not disappear. It goes quiet and turns into dirt.
Forty feet of gutter fed one downspout there, and it ended in an elbow pointed at the ground two inches from the block. Water came out fast enough to make a sound, hit the soil, turned, and ran along the wall towards the low side of the yard, under the mulch, out of sight. Nine years of that. Della came out with an umbrella and asked whether she should worry about the roof. I said the roof was fine. The roof had done its job perfectly. That was rather the problem.
The nine thousand dollars had bought a trench, a drain and a sump pump along the inside of that same wall, all of it working exactly as sold, all of it managing water a twelve dollar piece of pipe would have carried six feet out and made somebody else's business. Della asked what would have fixed it. Twelve dollars, and somebody standing in the rain once in 1996.
Every chapter has the same shape, so you always know where you are. A scene in a real house. What you need, with current prices. How it is done, in order. Other ways to do it — for the flat, for knees that do not do what they used to, for the buyer five hundred miles away. Why it works. Common mistakes. And last, always, an honest word.
In the back of the book
What each of these actually costs
Every figure below is in the book, with the chapter it comes from. This is the whole sales argument and it fits on one page.
Figures are indicative and vary widely by region and year. The book gives ranges, not quotes. It does not replace an inspection — three of its chapters are about commissioning one properly.
Within a minute of paying. A link, a file, and nothing else.
A PDF laid out for both screen and print. Take it to a viewing on a phone, or print it and write on it.
No login, no app, no subscription, no expiry. Save the file and it is yours.
If the book is revised, you get the new edition at no cost. Prices in it get updated.
Thirty days, no form and no reason required. One line to the address on your receipt and you are refunded. You keep the file — better you have it than feel cheated by it.
No, and a book that claimed to would be lying to you. Nobody here has seen your house. What you get is the way of looking: where to stand, what to touch, what each finding costs to answer, and which findings mean stop and telephone somebody. The verdict stays yours.
It does not, and it says so in every chapter. What it does is get you to the inspection already knowing what to point at, and let you read the report afterwards line by line instead of nodding at it. Chapters thirteen to fifteen are entirely about that.
Most of it. The ground chapters matter less when you are on the fourth floor, though they still tell you what to ask the building manager. Everything about doors, floors, frames, dates on equipment, reading a listing, hiring an inspector and reading the report applies unchanged. Every chapter has an other ways to do it section written for exactly this.
Probably the most, actually. A good inspector gives you three hours and a long document, and most buyers waste both because they do not know which questions are worth the time or which sentences in the report are the expensive ones. That is what part four is for.
A twenty dollar torch does most of it. There is a full shopping list in the back with prices and none of it is expensive. Two chapters ask you only to look, and one of those takes ninety seconds from the pavement.
The physics of water and soil does not change at a border, and neither does what a door tells you when a house has moved. The prices and the report conventions are American. Read the numbers as a sense of scale rather than a quote.
Ray Dawson is the narrator and the pen name this series is published under. The material is compiled from professional home-inspection practice, building science, published repair-cost data and public standards, and the scenes are illustrative composites rather than records of identifiable properties or people. That is set out in full on the legal notice. It is said here because the book's value rests on you trusting what it says, and a reader who felt misled about who was speaking would be right to discount the rest.
Ray Dawson · The Home Buyer's Manual · First edition