U.S. Inspect Blog

We had our first large group of people over to the house this past weekend: I had all of the fellas over for our annual fantasy football draft. This is something we all take very seriously. Everyone arrives with their own beer, snacks, notes, magazines, and about half of them brought laptops for on-the-fly research for those tough in-draft decisions.

With Hurricane Earl in the news and marching his way up the Eastern coast of the United States, I thought I'd repost our Hurricane Preparedness tips in case you missed it the first time.  Be careful.  Be safe.

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When it comes to mother nature, our only real defense is planning and preventative measures. So we've put together a list of hurricane preparation tips. Stay safe this season!

Have a tip to share? Tell us below and help keep others safe.

Hurricane Preparation Tips

Once my husband and I made the decision to sell our house, we knew we had our work cut out for us.  Our first step was to create a list so we would know exactly what needed to be done and a cost estimate for our tasks...  We walked through our home, room-by-room, around the exterior, through the basement and storage rooms. We wrote down items that needed repair, areas that needed to be painted and touched up, something that needed cleaning, and some that needed to be upgraded.

U.S. Inspect inspectors are in new places every day. They can find themselves belly down in a rodent-infested crawl space one day, and catching a glimpse of spectacular displays of natural beauty the next. And when we're lucky, some of those inspectors send us pictures of the wonderful places where they live and work so that we can share them here in our U.S. Inspect Scrapbook.

What I love about apps (iPhone apps in my case) is that there are so many things you never even think of until you enter into some new context, like home repairs. Then you find that there are dozens of apps that have already been written to help you. Here are some of my favorites:

We have been living in the house for 11 weeks now, and since my parents have gone home after visiting for a month, we are finally settling into a routine schedule. We set last weekend aside to get some things done that we had been putting off to make it a little more comfortable.

What is the world's largest house? Do you know? It's 484,000 square feet.  484,000 square feet--seriously? Seriously. So large in fact, you might say it's a castle--oh wait, it IS a castle.
 

Each year, more than 41,000 residential fires that claim about 350 lives and cause over 1,400 injuries are due to incidents that involve electrical equipment, such as extension cords, outlets and light bulbs. When was the last time you proactively looked for and corrected electrical safety hazards in your home?

ANSWER: Main Electrical Panel Needs to be Secured

This is the main electric panel falling off the side of a house during an inspection by Raleigh, NC Inspector, Eric Goodsell. The house was occupied at the time and everything was still working--but yikes!!