Well, the pre-sheetrock inspection went GREAT!! I like the guy that did the inspection, he seemed to know what he was talking about and knew what to look for. Only thing is, we did the inspection on Friday and today is Tuesday and I still don’t have the report. He said he’d mail it so I would get it on Saturday but it still hasn’t arrived. I don’t really think it’s the inspector’s fault, I swear the mail at this apartment complex is horrible. I get mail about three days a week, there are many days when not even one piece arrives. Strange huh? It’s either the mailman or the post office, I’m just glad I don’t have to put up with it for much longer.

Anyway, back to the inspection. The only thing he found wrong was that the roofers didn’t put flashing in the valleys. He also said it’s really no big deal unless you have trees that are going to drop leaves in the valleys. When it rains, if there’s no obstruction, the water will roll off into the gutters, but if there’s leaves in the valleys, it could cause some standing water and without flashing, the roof will leak. I told my salesperson but she’s waiting for the report before she tells the construction supervisor because I didn’t really know the exact terminology. Hopefully they’ll just fix it and we’ll move on, but if they don’t, it’s really not a big deal. The neighborhood is all new, there are no trees that are large enough to drop leaves on my roof and there probably won’t be any for at least 10-15 years. The roof the builder is using is only a 15 year roof anyway, so, while we’re living there, we won’t have a problem.

The other stuff was only stuff we had requested that they didn’t do properly. Like I asked them to move an outlet which they didn’t move. We asked for two speaker wire drops in the living area and there was only one. Just little things like that.

Actually, the inspector was impressed with the quality of the construction. Since we added the Energy Seal package, the builder is putting a seal all the way around the base frame and in the corners that are on outside walls. The inspector said that’s great, the insulation seal actually “glues” the house together and makes it stronger. He was especially impressed with the “Low-E” windows. He said it’s code to use double-pane windows but to get Low-E is usually an upgrade. The Low-E windows keep out the same amount of heat that SIX double-pane windows will keep out. Basically it lets the light in but not the heat. We tested them with our hands, we went to a window that had direct sunlight shining on it and there was hardly any heat coming through. That’s really good, it was NOT an upgrade.

Yesterday my salesperson called and said she needed to set up the final walk-through. She wanted to schedule it for September 28th at either 10:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m., I told her 10:00 a.m.. That’s a Wednesday. The closing will probably be on September 30th in the morning, which is a Friday. She said sometimes they’ll move it up a day, she’d let me know. I can have my inspector come in on September 27th. Wow, it’ll be here before we know it.

Oh, one other thing, the house we sold has a backyard that backs up to a main street. I drove down that main street the other day and looked over, the tree in the backyard had lost all its leaves! You’d think it was dead. The next week I drove by again and there was some new growth (whew!). Well, I have an idea what happened. The tree is a six year old Silver Leaf Maple and is quite beautiful, but, some summers here in the Houston area are just a little too hot and it will cause that particular maple to go into hibernation. Brent looked it up on the internet because when we were still in the house it was losing leaves but there was a constant supply of new growth. The difference was that we watered it EVERYDAY because we didn’t want it to die, especially since we were getting ready to close on the house. I noticed that the new owners aren’t doing much yardwork, they didn’t even mow the first two weeks they were there. Apparently they didn’t water the tree like we had been doing and it dropped it leaves. Maybe they finally caught on and started watering it and now there is some new growth. I just hope they don’t think it’s dead and cut it down, it’s a beautiful tree and gets better every year.