The basement had been finished sometime in the last five years and finished well: level floors, tidy trim, pot lights on dimmers, a proper egress window in the bedroom. Nothing about it invited a second look.
The panel cover came off nine minutes into the inspection, and the rest of the visit was spent tracing what was behind it.
5 items, ordered by priority.
Four breakers were double-tapped, feeding circuits added during the basement finish. The service was still the original 100 amp panel from 1978, now carrying a finished basement, a hot tub circuit, and an EV charger. The panel was full and then some.
Two junction boxes were covered by finished drywall with no access panel — found by tracing circuits, not by looking. Buried splices are a fire risk and a code violation, and locating the rest of them means opening the ceiling.
The city had no permit for the basement work. That means no rough-in inspection, no final, and no assurance that what is behind the drywall is anything like what is in front of it.
The original 1978 circuits are aluminum. Not automatically a problem, but the connections at the receptacles had not been pigtailed or rated for aluminum. Insurers increasingly ask about this.
All four alarms were manufactured in 2011. Alarms have a ten-year service life. Straightforward, but the kind of thing that is easy to forget on moving day.
The buyers walked. Not because the problems were unfixable — a service upgrade and an electrician’s day to open the ceiling would have handled most of it — but because the seller would not agree to a licensed electrician’s assessment before closing.
That is a legitimate outcome. An inspection that ends a deal has done its job just as much as one that saves it.
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