The gang starts off the show by talking about their lives spent working from home, and they quickly move on to projects happening around the house. Bill discusses the time that he ended up with a frozen outdoor faucet because he forgot to remove his garden hose. Reuben talks about the time that his entire 1.5-story home flooded because of a plumbing leak on the second floor. Tessa reminds us of the importance of knowing where the main water valve is. Tessa also talks about some flubs at her own home and shares the story of the first time she cut a hole in an exterior wall for a dryer duct.
The photos below show Reuben’s gutted first-floor bathroom and attic after the flood.
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
At the time of publishing, the transcription is not yet available. We’ll publish the transcription as soon as it becomes available. Here it is!
Bill Oelrich: So I blew up the pipe inside my house, so I had to get a plumber to come out and replace this. I did not dutifully unhook my hose in the fall, and that happened to me. It was a $350 mistake, and I got on with my life.
BO: Welcome, everybody, to Structure Talk, a Structure Tech presentation. My name is Bill Oelrich alongside Tessa Murry and Reuben Saltzman from the Structure Tech team. On today’s episode, our weekly check-ins in the COVID-19 era to see how everybody’s doing. Let’s start the conversation there. Reuben, Tessa, how was last week?
Tessa Murry: Go ahead, Reuben.
Reuben Saltzman: I can’t complain. Last week was fine. Spending a heck of a lot more time with the family than I ever have, which is working from home, doing that video call mullet thing where you wear a dress shirt and sweatpants. [laughter]
BO: I like that.
RS: That’s my world right now, in front of a video camera. And my goodness, I’ve had people ask what video camera I’m using, what are you doing for this and that. I tried to get somebody my video camera. I was like, “Oh, yeah. I just ordered another one for the office a couple of months ago. It was 20 bucks on Amazon. It wasn’t even that. And I went to order another one, they’re up to 160 bucks on Amazon today for the camera I bought a couple of months ago.
TM: Wow.
RS: I thought there were gouging laws, right?
TM: Yeah.
BO: Yeah. I’m more…
RS: How can they do that?
BO: I’m more focused right now, Reuben, on this idea of sweat pants. I don’t even own a pair of sweat pants.
TM: What? Bill!
BO: Are these like the soft and cushy kind, or are they more the windbreaker type? Give us some…
RS: It’s the windbreaker type. It’s Adidas. I got the three stripes running down the side for speed.
TM: Oh, my gosh.
BO: Gotcha, okay. Well, that’s cool. That’s cool. So Tessa, are you saying I should own sweatpants?
TM: Bill, how do you not own comfortable pants?
RS: Yeah. Bill wears slacks all day. [laughter]
BO: I love that term, slacks.
TM: Slacks. No, Bill. You’re always dressed to the nines.
BO: Yeah. I don’t know. I’m a kind of a denim guy when I don’t have to.
TM: I can’t remember the last time I put on a pair of jeans. [laughter] It’s been a while.
RS: What about if you go out shopping right now? What are you guys wearing? Are you still going out in sweatpants?
TM: Leggings, leggings.
RS: Okay. Well, we know Bill’s getting dressed up. [laughter]
BO: Yeah. My favorite pants are from Fjällräven. They’re the kinda cargo things that you can get from that store. These things are bulletproof. You could strap them between two vehicles and… Remember the old Levi Strauss deal where they pulled the pants apart? I don’t think these tear. [laughter]
TM: Oh, Bill. Only you.
RS: Nice.
BO: Yeah.
TM: You know what was really funny? I actually… I did leave the house on Tuesday this week. This was the first inspection I’ve done since this whole thing happened, and it wasn’t even really a full inspection. I went out to a group inspection our company was doing on a commercial building, just to help out for a small portion of it. And I came out into the kitchen that morning wearing my Structure Tech gray cargo pants and my button-down black polo shirt. And Jay was like, “Hey, the Structure Tech outfit,” ’cause it’s been weeks since I’ve worn Structure Tech anything, really. I’ve got two different categories in my wardrobe, casual/pajamas and Structure Tech. [laughter] And I’ve been wearing casual/pajamas for three weeks. So it felt really good to put on some professional clothes this week.
RS: Nice. And you know, I gotta say. For anybody listening, the cargo pants you mentioned, we gotta put it in a plug for those guys.
TM: Oh, yeah. They’re great pants. What are they called?
RS: It’s the 5.11 Stryke Pants. Those, we have declared, are the official pant of the home inspector. We tell everybody. We wear these to inspector events, and everybody says, “Where did you get those pants?
TM: And Stryke is spelled S-T-R-Y-K-E, correct?
RS: I think that’s right.
TM: I think there’s a Y, a Y in there.
RS: Exactly.
TM: I never thought in a million years I would be the type of person to have a selfie ring. For anybody that doesn’t know what that is, it is a round light that illuminates your face for filming videos or taking selfies. And Reuben graciously had one delivered to my house because of all of the TE classes we’re teaching online, and apparently my face wasn’t bright enough. So thank you, Reuben, for that.
RS: Oh, yeah. Of course. Well, I got one for myself. And I was just like, “Hey, these things are great.” And you, Tessa, it’s not that your face isn’t bright enough, it’s just that the only place you have to sit is right in front of a really bright window. It’s like, “All right. Here’s this wall of white, and then there’s this dark shadow. Is that a male? Is it a female?” We don’t know who we’re looking at here.
TM: It doesn’t matter, male or female. The options are, I can either broadcast from my bedroom so that 250 people daily can see where I sleep at night, or I could choose the living room/dining room open area and you would catch family members walking around in the background the whole time. So I have a window behind me, and that’s as good as it’s gonna get.
BO: We went to the old word with slacks referring to pants. Maybe you should get some drapes in the old apartment. Maybe you could block out some light with a good set of drapes.
TM: Well, I have kind of tweaked it around here. You know, it would be nice if the platform we use had backgrounds that you could import, kind of like Zoom does, but the GoToWebinar, I don’t think has that.
RS: No, it doesn’t.
TM: Yeah.
BO: So tell me, what’s the week been like. How many classes have you taught?
TM: Two, right?
RS: Yeah. We do two a week. We’re doing classes on Wednesdays at 1:00 PM and Thursdays at 9:00 AM And we started out with our one-hour class, and then we moved it up to the two-hour. And then just yesterday…
BO: Today’s Friday.
TM: Yeah.
RS: Today is Friday, we’re recording this. And just yesterday, we did our first three-hour class in webinar format, and next week will be the four-hour class.
TM: I think the last time we talked about this, I was like, “Yeah, this is… It’s really fun.” And I have to admit, the four-hour class is going to be a bit of a marathon. Isn’t it, Reuben?
RS: They always are, but at least now we got each other.
TM: Yes.
RS: It’s way easier. And if we weren’t a tag team, if it was just one of us talking to the camera, it’s like, what would happen with all the jokes? They would fall so flat.
TM: All the jokes as in like maybe the two jokes that you might make during the whole class. No, it’s true, it’s true. It’s nice to have someone to kind of laugh, laugh with you or at you, whatever it may be. [laughter]
RS: Laugh dutifully. [laughter]
TM: Yes.
BO: So I call this fishbowl humor, right?
TM: Oh yeah.
BO: Like, you think your home inspector jokes are funny and the rest of the world is like, “What the hell did he just say?”
TM: Yeah, yeah.
RS: I’m sorry, but Tessa and I have both taught hundreds of these classes live now, and we know the things that people laugh at, and so it’s always like you gotta leave a pause after you kinda get your reps in. I mean, the one that is the unintentional funny, it’s the one that more people laugh at than anything else. It’s not even supposed to be funny. Tessa, you know where I’m going. It’s the garden hose shooting water out.
TM: Oh, yes.
RS: Did anybody laugh at that at your ____?
TM: Yeah, Reuben, it is…
RS: Okay.
TM: Yeah, it is inappropriate sophomoric humor, I think, but it always makes a few men giggle. Yeah. [laughter]
BO: Nice.
RS: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
BO: Gotcha. So there’s good flow, I expect, at this garden hose is what you’re saying.
RS: You’ll have to come to the class.
BO: Okay.
RS: I can’t say anything else.
TM: It’s the old homes class. But the thing that’s bizarre with all of this, like the online stuff and basically doing these big classes with so many people on them, we don’t have anybody’s webcams up, and we don’t have anybody’s mics, on and so these moments that we’re used to having some sort of response engaging the audience, there is zero feedback. [laughter] Nothing.
RS: Yes.
BO: Maybe you can pump some canned laughter into the background.
TM: Maybe we should.
RS: Well, that’s what I’m saying. I’m glad we got each other ’cause I’ll laugh when Tessa drops them and she laughs when I do so. For each other.
TM: We’re entertaining each other at least. Maybe not the other people but.
RS: Exactly. It’s good stuff.
BO: Gotcha. So we’re about week five, six-ish into the COVID-19 thing. What’s the market update from Structure Tech?
RS: Business is picking up. It’s not at all what we’re supposed to have this time of the year. It’s definitely slow, but it’s picking up. I think a really interesting thing to look at is, if you go to ShowingTime, you can just Google “ShowingTime”, and they keep track of showings, real estate showings all over the country. And you can break it down by your state to see how many real estate showings are going on. And all over the country, we’ve started to climb back up. There was a continuous drop that started in early March, and I think we’ve bottomed out. Things are definitely climbing back up. And when you compare Minnesota to other places like California, our bottom wasn’t nearly as low as they had in California, and we’re climbing a lot faster than some other places are. So I think we’re on the rebound. I’m excited. I’m happy about this.
BO: So what are we back to? Maybe 60%, 65%, 70% of normal right now, or what kind of numbers are we at?
RS: I wanna say maybe 50%-60% of normal. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, which is, I’m not complaining about that. That is a heck of a lot better than nothing. We could be stuck at home doing no inspections right now. So I am so grateful for what we have.
BO: Yeah, we have such a short season here, right? It’s a challenge to keep people down right now. And just even out on the kinda like the daily walks. I’ve started walking now for some odd reason, pass some time. The contractor vans are all over the place. It feels like the contractors have not slowed down at all, but hard to keep Minnesotans down after being locked up for four or five months before the pandemic hit.
TM: For sure.
RS: Time to get started on yard work, time to de-winterize your faucets and get out there and start working on stuff, right?
TM: Mm-hmm.
BO: Yeah, I turned on my sprinkler system two nights ago. Everything seems to be working fine unlike a couple of years ago but…
TM: Ooh.
BO: So have I told you guys my story about turning on my hose bib? A couple of years back, I went to the side of my house and I’ve got a frost-free, and this was in April, and my hose was still attached. The home inspector walk of shame as you walk up to your frost-free sillcock, let’s call it sillcock, I call it faucet. Anyway, hose is still attached, and the little… What’s that little plastic thing that sits on top of your frost-free that kinda… Is it the backflow preventer?
RS: I like to call it a mushroom cap, but yeah, I think backflow preventer is probably a better term for it.
BO: Gotcha. Well, this thing was kind of sitting there, a little kittywampus. Like, it just didn’t look right. And then I touched it very lightly and then it fell to the ground. I was like, “Uh-oh, what does this mean? Does this mean it’s still working or do I have bigger problems?” So I turned on the faucet and just let it run for a little bit, and then I shut it off. And I went downstairs, and not everybody has an infrared camera, but I do, and not everybody has a moisture meter, but I do. So I’m like I’m gonna look at the ceiling where the pipe runs and just see if maybe we’ve got issues. Yeah, I looked at it quickly and I thought maybe there was some water there and so I said, “Okay.” I came back about 15 minutes later, there was a big old puddle of water obviously sitting on my ceiling.
TM: Oh no.
BO: So I blew up the pipe inside my house, so I had to get a plumber to come out and replace this, which meant I had to cut a hole in…
RS: Oh rookie.
BO: Yeah, rookie.
RS: Rookie homeowner mistake. Right?
TM: Oh, that sucks.
BO: Yeah.
TM: And it was a finished basement so you had to redo the… Was it sheetrock on the ceiling and everything?
BO: Yeah, it was my basement bathroom, so I had to cut a hole in the ceiling.
TM: Oh no. Urghh. First and last time you’ll ever do that though, right?
BO: Yeah, until the next time I forget to unhook the hose.
[laughter]
BO: I mean, winter descends on us quickly here, so that is one problem, but…
TM: You need to call Cura, Bill. Call Cura.
BO: Yeah. So I did not dutifully un-hook my hose in the fall, and that happened to me. It was a $350 mistake, and I got on with my life. But, so be careful, if you’re turning on your hose bibs right now and they’re frost free and you had a hose attached to them, be very suspicious of what might happen inside your house once you turn the water on.
RS: Yeah, $350 mistake. That’s not too bad. It could have been a lot worse, man. I had a neighbor who had something similar happen where I think he had just forgotten to winterize it, maybe. I don’t remember what the issue was, but it leaked and it flooded his entire finished basement. They had to gut the whole thing.
TM: Oh no!
RS: For this type of thing to happen, Bill, you got off super easy for 350 bucks, I gotta say that.
BO: Well, I was paying attention, a little too late, but I was paying attention, so…
[chuckle]
RS: Yeah.
BO: The spilled water business in your house, this can turn into a really long dark hole pretty quickly. My neighbors… [chuckle] My neighbors last fall, they went to bed, this was in November. Some sweet people live three or four houses down from me. They went to bed, got up in the morning and their kitchen was completely flooded, the toilet somehow didn’t stop running, it overflowed and didn’t stop running all night. The bathroom was above their kitchen, so it flooded out their entire kitchen. All the cabinets were full of water that originated from the toilet and they ended up literally gutting this house, in that area of the house, everything below the toilet down to the basement, and they’re just moving in today. They’re hauling furniture back in today.
RS: Oh my gosh!
TM: What a disaster!
RS: I can relate ’cause I had something similar happen once, and this was a couple of houses ago. This was when I used to live in Minneapolis. Well, you’ve heard about my one-and-a-half-story house.
BO: Yeah.
RS: Love those one and a half stories.
[laughter]
BO: Insert eye roll.
TM: Yeah. [chuckle]
RS: I don’t remember when this was, probably 2006, 2007, something like that. We were in the middle of doing a half remodel at the half-story, it was just kind of semi-finished. It was kind of clunky, and we were like, “We wanna brighten this up, redo a bunch of it,” and we tore down the ceiling and all this old insulation. It was called Kimsul. And it’s like these super… Tessa, you surely know what it is. It’s a thin, asphalt-impregnated layers of paper that are just like… They crumble apart on you and it gets in the air. We gutted that all out. We started… It just started falling down as we tried taking the ceiling off, and eventually, we’re left with this big space with basically no insulation. And it was late fall when this happened, but there was a little half bathroom up there, and it didn’t even occur to me that it’s gonna get really cold here now that we’ve kind of taken most of the insulation out of here.
RS: And so, you know where this is going, it caused one of the copper joints, soldered copper joints, to split in the middle of the day or the middle of the evening, I don’t remember. It was the middle of the day, that’s when it was, because it happened while I was gone from the home. I was out doing a home inspection, and my wife gets home, she walks in the front door and it’s like it’s raining inside the house. I mean, a whole half inch pipe dumping water at the second floor, so there’s water coming out of every penetration, like pouring out of the light fixtures…
TM: Oh my gosh!
RS: Doorways, everything. It’s just pouring, and not a little bit. And so, she didn’t know where the main shut off valve was, and she called me and I’m doing an inspection, so I don’t answer. I got my phone on silent. She was able to get a hold my dad and he was able to talk her through where to find the main shut-off valve. So eventually, she got the water shut off, but it’s like our house is flooded from the top down. And thankfully, it was an unfinished basement, so we had access to everything above and below the finished space, but it was a disaster. It was a big insurance claim. We had to completely gut the bathroom below it, that kind of took the brunt of it. All the outside walls were saturated and that turned into a full bathroom gut, a full second floor gut, had to rip out the walls in a couple of the bedrooms. That was a huge insurance claim, that was a big deal. And so, that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve done as a homeowner, is pull that insulation out, not thinking about how cold I’m making my house.
TM: Oh man, that’s horrible.
BO: It’s a giant petri dish.
TM: Wow!
RS: We had a damage restoration company come out the same day and put their suckers on the floor, start sucking all the water out, and fans, and we opened up the walls right away. So it didn’t… It dried out really quickly. Although, I’ll tell you guys, this is… I’ve told this story before, I tell it at a lot of classes that I teach. But this is where the story came from, ’cause I always talk about why we don’t use infrared cameras to try to find water in exterior walls. This… My outside wall was saturated. I knew this. And I had another home inspector who was doing Stucco inspections with his infrared camera, and I was referring him a lot of the time, and I had him come out with his infrared camera, and I was like, “Yeah, I thought it’d be a fun one to see to just see how wet these walls are.” And no matter what angle we scanned it from, it showed the same temperature in the entire wall. It did not show any moisture. And I was like, “Wow, that’s pretty crazy, ’cause I know it’s wet.” And we took a hammer and we busted the wall open, and I took the insulation out of that wall, and we just… We wrung the installation like a sponge, and the water just poured out of it.
BO: What was the…
RS: And the infrared…
BO: What was the cladding on the outside of it?
RS: Well, we were scanning it from the inside. We also scanned it from the outside, it was wood cladding.
TM: Wait, Reuben, wait, was this lath and plaster or was there a poly vapor barrier in the wall? Crazy.
RS: Yup, that really diminished my faith in trying to find water intrusion at an exterior wall with an infrared camera.
TM: Yeah.
BO: Okay, so I have some technical questions here because IR cameras are often good at showing temperature differences, and we know if we use IR cameras, infrared cameras. So was just the entire surface wet, so it was all the same temperature, so you couldn’t see anything different? Or…
RS: No, the inside of the wall was wet, but there was no evaporation happening. It was all trapped within the wall. And unless you have evaporation, you’re not gonna have a difference in temperature. There’s a good example I learned during an infrared class I took. Let’s say you go in a basement and you’ve got a wet basement floor and the humidity level in that room is 100%, meaning that moisture cannot evaporate. It’s… There is no more room in the air for moisture. If there is no evaporation happening and you scan that floor, it’s gonna be the exact same temperature as anything else. The moisture is not gonna show up cooler.
BO: Sure. So you had one static temperature you’re looking at.
RS: Exactly.
BO: You put your moisture meter on in and it’s just saying like…
RS: Yeah. We’re getting super geeky in describing these details but…
[chuckle]
TM: Man! Well, I have a water disaster story, too, but it just pales in comparison to yours, Reuben, and yours Bill, too.
RS: Oh, let’s hear it.
TM: Well… So this was after we just moved into our condo. We re-did the kitchen and all new cabinets, new sink, all of that. And Jay installed the sink and I was like, “Sure. Are you sure you’re comfortable doing that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And he kind of tinkered around with it for a little while. And meanwhile, side note, when I was dating him, in his condo, I had noticed, being a home inspector I snooped a little bit, that he had two corrugated plastic drains in his condo. [chuckle]
RS: Are you kidding me?
TM: One was in the [20:49] ____ and one was in the kitchen. So. Okay, fast forward, and we’re in our condo and I’m like, “Am I gonna let him do this sink or not?” And I was like, “Well, he’s really sure about it. Okay, well, just… I’ll trust him, let him do the sink.” Okay, so fast-forward, it’s Thanksgiving and all the family is over, and we are… We cooked this big meal. And we had a ton of dishes that we were trying to do throughout the prep. And I was doing dishes with my mom and I looked down ’cause I see something out of the corner of my eye. And about 10 feet way, I see this stream of water coming out from underneath the refrigerator and moving down the hallway. And I was like, “Oh, my God!”
TM: And I pulled the refrigerator out and there was so much water underneath it that I was like, “Where is this coming from?” And it was actually coming from underneath the sink. So the drain was leaking so badly that for the last 30 minutes I had been doing dishes, almost all of the water from the sink had been going into the cabinet, running underneath the cabinets across the floor under the refrigerator and down the hallway. [laughter]
BO: Wow.
RS: Oh, no.
TM: It was just like, “Oh, my God!” So…
BO: Who cleaned it up? Was Jay in charge of cleaning that up?
TM: Oh, I wish. It was like all hands on deck. Every single towel we had, fans going, all of that, and luckily we caught it quick enough that it didn’t damage our flooring or show up on the neighbor’s ceiling. So, we were really, really lucky. Yeah, I didn’t let him touch that sink drain after that. And actually… Reuben, I think your dad came out and helped fix the plumbing after that. So…
RS: He has helped me with a lot of plumbing projects, too.
TM: Oh, yeah. Yup.
BO: So was this before or after the meal?
TM: You know what, this was before the meal. This was during the day while we were doing all of the cooking. We had lots of food going on. So…
RS: How much ridicule did he take that entire meal?
TM: You know, he probably should have taken more because, fast forward, there was another plumbing issue, which I won’t get into. But yes, I have completely banned him from touching any plumbing now. He’s done.
RS: Oh, man. It’s a really good thing he doesn’t listen to this podcast, isn’t it?
[laughter]
TM: Yes, it is. Sorry, Jay. This is back when I was doing construction and I was working on a house, and the site boss at the time told me, “Hey, I need you to go basically install holes in these houses for the dryer exhaust duct.” I was fairly new to construction. I’d done a little bit of framing but I had never done anything like that before. And he’s like, “Here, just take this Sawzall and cut a hole in the wall.” And I was like, “Okay, how big of a hole?” And he was like, “You know, just roughly the size of a dryer duct.” He didn’t give me any direction. I can’t believe this. And I was like, “Okay, sure. Why not?” And so I started cutting out holes through exterior walls all the way through the sheet rock, through the insulation, through the OSB and vinyl siding. And the first time I did it, I just left this nasty, old, huge hole in the side of the house. And he came by and I was like, “Hey, Mr. Steve, is this okay? And he’s like, “Yeah, if you can fit a cat through it, you can caulk it. It’s fine.”
BO: If you can… Wait a second, if you can fit a what through it?
TM: A cat, like an actual cat. C-A-T.
BO: An animal. Wow.
TM: If you can fit a cat through it, you can caulk it. It’s fine. But I look back now, and all the knowledge I have now about penetrations and air ceiling and water intrusion, and I’m just I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. I just devastated those houses.” And, yeah.
BO: What was the foreman’s name or the… I think all good construction people need a nickname. Something like…
TM: Oh, oh, gosh. He was temporary. He’s a great guy, and actually to this day, I still stay in touch with him and his wife, and I love him. But, Mr. Steve, this was in Louisiana, so you always call people Mr or Mrs, whatever their first name is.
BO: Sure. Mr. Steve needed to work on his leadership skill, just a little bit.
TM: Yeah. He…
BO: Give me some direction.
TM: He had a little bit too much trust in me and in my capabilities.
BO: That’s a good thing, to a point.
TM: To a point, yeah.
BO: At least, they don’t get a lot of hard-driving rain in Louisiana, and…
TM: Oh, man. There are tons of bugs and termites and ants and all sorts of things just crawling in through that huge hole.
BO: How do you sleep at night, Tess?
TM: It bothers me, it does. It does bother me.
RS: There was a situation, I can’t remember how long ago this was, but I didn’t know what I know now. And it was a friend of a friend who needed help replacing all the outlets in her house. She wanted to change them all from these dingy ones to new white ones or something. And I was like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll help you with that.” And she was already at it. She was working on it, so I came in and started to help. And it was not modern wires, it was kind of the older cloth-covered ones. So it’s a lot tougher to tell which is hot and which is neutral. We figured out whether we had the polarity correct or not when we were all done by just plugging something in and making sure that it worked. Somehow, we got everything completely right by the time we’re done ’cause…
TM: Oh, no.
RS: Everything we plugged in worked.
BO: Your polarity test had nothing to do with whether it worked or not.
TM: Oh.
RS: So, given the odds of flipping a coin, I’m sure I got at least half of those wrong.
BO: Again, did you go back at a later date and correct your good intentions?
RS: It was a long time ago. This was probably late teens or something.
BO: You’re that old?
RS: I am well past my late teens, Bill.
BO: Oh, I thought you meant the 19th, like the teens of…
TM: The turn of the century. [chuckle]
BO: That’s what I was going for. Yeah.
RS: Good times.
TM: Good intentions, good intentions.
RS: Good times.
BO: Last week you guys were all whipped up about attic accesses and stuff. Did you have any major crisises or crises in our your week that you’d wanna share with everybody or not?
RS: Nothing like that. That was a pretty big deal, Bill.
TM: I’ll remember that forever. No.
RS: Yeah, I’m just calming down. Thank goodness I had nothing so big. But I’m sure we’ll have something big before the next one.
BO: So did you actually get a hold of the city and go talk to them about this or did you just let it go?
RS: Well, this is something that I brought up to the city like four or five years ago when the code changed. I’m not trying to open that can of worms again. I already gave it my best shot and nobody seemed to care. But now this agent we were talking to, she had some pointed comments for that building official. So who knows? Maybe somebody else is gonna get some results.
BO: I can promise you, if she walks into that same building department, they’re gonna accidentally call her Reuben and ask her to leave very politely.
[laughter]
RS: Didn’t we already tell you you’re not welcome here? Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
TM: Did Reuben send you?
BO: Alright, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Be careful turning on your faucets at the exterior, or at least go inside right away and make sure you don’t have water pouring out of some penetration. Never let Jay touch any plumbing, and make sure that everybody in your family knows where the main water shut-off is just incase in an emergency.
TM: Yes, yes.
RS: That’s good advice, Bill. Yes.
BO: Alright.
TM: And if you have a plumbing issue, call Neil, apparently.
RS: Yeah. Call my dad. Exactly.
BO: That’s it. We’ve covered all our bases for this week.
RS: Cool.
BO: I hope you have a great weekend. I hope next week is way better than this week. And you’ve been listening to Structure Talk, a Structure Tech presentation. We will catch you next time.
Author: Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections
