house
Tales of Inspecting
February 5, 2009 by David Helm · 2 Comments
I know that many home inspectors have stories (some of them horror) of inspections that did not go exactly as planned. I have heard one story about a very dangerous person, with gun, that happened to be in the house. My own little story is nowhere near as nasty as that one, but it had me worried for a bit. I always save the crawl space for last. It is a dirty place and I don’t wish to take any of the dirt back into the home. This particular day, my client was in California, the realtor came to open the house and left, so I was alone at the site. The crawl space was a particularly tight one, but one I could traverse with some effort. As I was coming down the home stretch, so to speak, I came to an area that had flexible duct work that was pretty close to the ground. Since I needed to see some plumbing nearby, I decided that I could probably push my way under this duct (after all, it was flexible). I got about halfway through when I found that I could not make it any further. Okay I think, I’ll just back out from under it. WRONG! Here I am, stuck in a crawl space, my cell phone is in my tool bag outside the entry. I can’t move forward, backward or sideways. What a predicament! After struggling for a good 5 minutes (seemed like hours), I figured I needed to stop, relax and think this through. I wear heavy duty rain gear in crawl spaces. First thing I did was remove the rain coat; it felt like I could move a little, but not enough. It was winter, so I had a fairly heavy shirt on; removed it. Now I am naked from the waste up and feeling really ridiculous. My next move was to very slowly inch my way backward. After about 5 minutes of this I was free. Put my shirt and raincoat back on and went the long way to get out. While laying there thinking what to do, I was seeing the headlines: “Home Inspector found dead lodged in crawl space!” What a time!
Thanks for reading.
David Helm, Bellingham home inspector
