Commercial Building Inspection Home Inspection Blog

Are you one of those people who wonder what a building inspector sees when he disappears into the tiny dark space under a house?  Wonder no more!  Here are some photos from a Fort Lauderdale home inspection we did.

The cracking concrete in the following photos are floor joists, very important structural member which prevents the floor you walk on from collapsing.  They are cracking because the steel inside the joists are corroded (a condition known as spalling).

So the contractor’s response to correct this problem is to provide additional support to the floor.  Well if you ever played the game Jenga, it’s a bit like that. (everyone hold their breath!)

Or my personal favorite.  How much many pounds do you think your house weighs?  How much weight do you think a 2×4 can support?

I was at an inspection the other day in Boca Raton and I found something very interesting.  Frightening, but interesting.  The property was consisted of a class A office building that was just over 100,000 square feet.  The building was originally constructed in 1985 but was completely renovated in 2007.The electrical system for the entire 100,000 square foot building was fed through one main service meter.  When I was performing my electrical inspection on the service meter, it looked like there was an explosion in the meter can.  One of the reasons this is such a big deal is because, without getting to technical, it takes some serious electrical components to power 100,000 square feet of office and it is all feeding right through three wires inside this box. 

Luckily, the buyer of the property hired an inspector because the owners and the property manager had no idea about this problem.