To watch a video version of this podcast, click here: https://youtu.be/C6MC7V08nS4
In this episode of the Structure Talk podcast, hosts Reuben Saltzman and Tessa Murry discuss various topics related to home inspection, including the impact of AI on the industry, personal anecdotes about gutter cleaning, and a detailed case study involving a homeowner’s water intrusion and mold issues. They explore the complexities of building science, the importance of proper installation and maintenance, and the challenges of identifying and resolving moisture problems in homes.
Here’s the link to check out Inspector Empire Builder:
https://events.iebcoaching.com/events
Takeaways
AI tools are evolving rapidly and can be overwhelming for businesses.
Investing time and resources into understanding AI is crucial for growth.
Gutter maintenance can lead to unexpected challenges and solutions.
Homeowners should be aware of potential water intrusion issues in their homes.
Mold problems can arise from various sources, including improper installation.
Investigating moisture issues requires thorough inspection and testing.
Condensation can occur even in summer, indicating underlying problems.
Proper installation of siding and flashing is essential to prevent water damage.
Home inspectors should be vigilant about concealed moisture damage.
Finding qualified contractors for moisture issues can be challenging.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Weather Check
03:02 AI in Home Inspection
05:54 Gutter Cleaning Adventures
09:54 Case Study Introduction
13:40 Homeowner’s Water Issues
17:04 Mold and Moisture Problems
21:13 Investigating Water Intrusion
24:55 Condensation Concerns
29:16 Finding Solutions
33:11 Wrap-Up and Future Discussions
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is an AI-generated transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is mostly accurate, it will contain some errors due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host alongside building science geek, Tessa Murry. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom.
Reuben Saltzman (00:01.868)
Welcome back to the show. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast. Tessa, how you doing on this lovely day?
Tessa Murry (00:08.974)
Hey Ruben, I can’t complain. It’s sunny and hot and humid where I am. How about you?
Reuben Saltzman (00:14.968)
sunny and perfect where I am. doesn’t get any better than this. loving life right now. I think it’s good. I’ve got, I’ve got a blue sky I’m looking at right now. So.
Tessa Murry (00:17.604)
How’s the air quality?
Tessa Murry (00:26.628)
Okay, it’s not smoky and looking like the apocalypse.
Reuben Saltzman (00:30.474)
No, no, it’s really not it’s it feels really nice I think that’s where we were at the last time we recorded a podcast, but it just blue skies clear and I Yeah, life is good Yeah Before we get it in the show got to give a shout out to our show sponsors IEB inspector Empire builder last week
Tessa Murry (00:42.392)
Perfect. Nice.
Reuben Saltzman (00:54.22)
We had the summer mastermind. had been talking about it. It was all about AI and we had a bunch of presenters come on and Tessa, I’ve got so many notes and my head is going to explode with all of the stuff that I could be doing that I want to start doing by the time we were done with this. mean, it was, it was, I don’t know. I don’t want to say half day session. was more like a three quarter day session.
Tessa Murry (01:00.142)
Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (01:24.686)
I was thinking I need to hire somebody on full time to just do AI stuff for my company. There is just an unbelievable amount. And as an IEB member, I have access to the recordings and I will surely be watching them over and over again. So ton of value out of that. And well, if you missed it, you missed it. But the group we’re talking about is IEB Inspector Empire Builder.
Tessa Murry (01:33.39)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tessa Murry (01:43.748)
My goodness.
Reuben Saltzman (01:54.446)
And even if you’re not a home inspector, that session would have been helpful for a lot of different people. Just trying to have robots do your job. mean, it’s it’s mind blowing what can be done these days, and it’s just going to keep getting faster.
Tessa Murry (02:09.476)
feel like it’s a full-time job just keeping up with what tools are available, how they work, how you implement them, what can be done. And I’m sure you were probably learning a lot about that that day and hearing other companies and how they were using it and what they were doing and getting a bunch of ideas. But like you said, I feel like there will be positions at least in the next few years for sure as this is changing and evolving so quickly.
Reuben Saltzman (02:23.736)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (02:35.406)
For companies that want to get into it, don’t know how to, don’t have the resources or time, they hire someone who’s an expert at this and can start implementing and using it in various ways.
Reuben Saltzman (02:46.092)
Yes. Yeah. And I gotta, I gotta point out the irony here. I’m sure other people are thinking about it, how it’s all these tools that are supposed to save us time. Yet I want to hire somebody full time to implement it. Which one is it?
Tessa Murry (03:03.172)
You know what though Ruben, I feel like that is just life and that’s part of owning a company is that like when you are growing and evolving, you have to put time and energy into creating the systems that allow your business to run smoothly and to grow quickly. You can’t just keep running, running, running without looking ahead and thinking about
Reuben Saltzman (03:23.33)
Yes. Yep. Yep. It’s an investment.
Tessa Murry (03:30.19)
how you can make it easier, how you can make it more efficient, how you can make it grow on a larger scale. And so I think it’s a wise investment in time and energy for any business owner at this point to understand what’s available, yeah, and to invest in it probably.
Reuben Saltzman (03:38.541)
thank you. I hope so.
Yep. For sure. So that that was just a little callback. Shout out to our sponsors. And then also one other callback here was my my gutter problem. I’ve been lamenting over this on a couple of different shows, and I thought I should share my GoPro, just my GoPro picture so you can see what I’m talking about here. Let me share my screen. We’ll share this and.
Tessa Murry (03:57.408)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (04:10.1)
For anybody that’s listening, we started recording our podcast. I don’t know how long ago. We didn’t really advertise it too much because it’s Ruben and I and all of our 10 listeners. But if you would like to watch us, you’d like to watch this podcast, how can they find it Ruben?
Reuben Saltzman (04:23.031)
Yes.
Reuben Saltzman (04:29.322)
You can go to YouTube and you go to the structure tech YouTube channel or you just go to the show notes. I mean, wherever you’re finding this, whatever platform you’re on, we publish the notes for every show and we put a link to our YouTube video right there. So we make it super easy. So that’s that’s that. And so now you can see what I’m talking about. What you’re looking at here is my gutter.
It’s clearly clogged and there’s a pole in the middle of the screen. That is my 28 foot extension pole with a GoPro on the end of it, just so I could see how it’s clogged. And if you look at the left side of the picture, there’s the downspout and you can see it’s not like super clogged. It’s just clogged right before the downspout. It’s just this little mound of these things that have blown onto the roof over the past several years. And it’s finally gotten bad enough where my gutter overflows.
Tessa Murry (05:06.372)
Thanks.
Tessa Murry (05:19.907)
Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (05:27.854)
had to do something about it. And there was just one day last week where I said, that’s it. I don’t care what it takes. I’m getting this unclogged. And so I got my extension pole and I tried fashioning a little pusher onto the end of it. I took all these pieces of metal. made this metal bracket, tried doing it, wouldn’t work. And I thought about renting a 40 foot extension ladder to get up there. And finally,
Tessa Murry (05:51.0)
Hmm.
Tessa Murry (05:56.321)
No.
Reuben Saltzman (05:57.322)
It just came to me like, look, I’ve got a deck in the backyard. All I need to do is put my ladder on the deck and then get my big extension pole and run my extension pole all the way down and push it. So I connected the leaf blower to the downspout and the downspout extension. I duct taped the end of it. I had my wife run in the leaf blower while I was up there pushing all the stuff and every and as I would
Tessa Murry (06:07.562)
Mmm.
Reuben Saltzman (06:26.638)
push it over the opening, you’d see it just shoot up into the air. Very satisfying. And yeah, now I don’t have a clogged gutter anymore. But now the dumb part, now the really dumb part. The gutter just kind of looked dirty and there was some other miscellaneous debris. And I thought, I’m just gonna get the rest of this debris. I’ll get my garden hose with the jet sprayer on there.
Tessa Murry (06:30.756)
my gosh, brilliant!
Tessa Murry (06:47.961)
Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (06:54.358)
And I’ll clear all that out. So I brought the garden hose up the ladder with me, got the jet sprayer and it worked really well. I mean, I was able to like shoot it into the gutter and push all of that debris down the downspout. And I was, you know, I was shooting water for about 10 minutes, got it super clean. And then at some point it was like, it wasn’t draining as fast as it should. And I was thinking, what, what’s the problem? The downspout must be a little bit clogged. And then I realized.
I’ve still got my leaf blower duct taped to the end of the downspout.
Tessa Murry (07:30.306)
Yes! are human. You are human sometimes. I love these moments, Ruben. Thank you for sharing that. Did you damage the leaf blower with all that water coming into it?
Reuben Saltzman (07:33.23)
my goodness. Yeah. Yep. That was great. That was great. No, no, it’s a big steel BR 600. It’s a commercial thing and it just sprayed a ton of water out after I fired it up again. No worse for the wear. But, you know, of course my first thought is I just destroyed it.
Tessa Murry (07:51.593)
my gosh. that’s too funny.
Thanks.
Reuben Saltzman (08:02.414)
It’s the dumbest thing ever. My gutters clean. Yeah, yeah, that was a, that was a $600 gutter cleaning. just accomplished. No, it worked. worked.
Tessa Murry (08:03.362)
daughter’s queen leaf blower destroyed.
Tessa Murry (08:12.384)
man. Well, yeah. And I wonder how much, how much would it have cost? Did you ever get an estimate on what it would cost to have a company come out and just clean your gutters real quick so you didn’t have to risk your life and ruin your leaf blower? Okay, no.
Reuben Saltzman (08:21.226)
No, never even considered it.
Reuben Saltzman (08:26.242)
Are there companies that do that? There has to be. Of course.
Tessa Murry (08:29.014)
Yes, yeah, there are companies that clean out gutters. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (08:33.142)
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I’m pretty sure Cura Home, you know, we’ve had them on pretty sure they do gutter cleaning, not positive, but. But even if they do, I don’t think they get up three stories.
Tessa Murry (08:43.18)
I would think so. I would think so. Yeah.
Tessa Murry (08:52.15)
Well, they should. Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, I’ve seen some companies in, you know, rural Wisconsin that drive around advertising that they clean gutters and stuff like that. Usually they’re like window cleaning companies. They’ve got the equipment to kind of get up there and they’re comfortable being up high and they, know, so yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (08:52.408)
But who knows? They should. Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (09:02.082)
Okay.
Of course. Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (09:11.532)
Now, next time I might check that out. But now I’ve got a solution.
Tessa Murry (09:17.536)
What a fun story. You know, and going back to that picture of your gutters, it looked like a lot of it was just like the granules from your shingles that had kind of cemented together with whatever dirt and like little like organic leaf matter had decayed in there.
Reuben Saltzman (09:19.096)
Yep. Yep. Thanks.
Reuben Saltzman (09:31.082)
There’s a little bit of that on top of that. Yeah, but the roof is relative. gosh time flies I was gonna say the roof is new. It’s ten years old It was new when I bought the house Yeah, my goodness, yeah, all right, so
Tessa Murry (09:33.825)
Okay. Yeah.
Tessa Murry (09:42.38)
Wow. Crazy. Yeah, there it goes. Time does fly. Well, good story, Ruben. I can’t say I would have put in that kind of effort. I would have been calling someone, so good for you. The only thing we’re missing is a video of that. I wish you could have recorded that, Ruben.
Reuben Saltzman (10:00.27)
Had to do it.
Reuben Saltzman (10:05.58)
I you know what? I really wanted to record it. I wanted to record it but my pole I only had one extension pole and I was using it to push stuff. I Couldn’t record it and push stuff at the same time Yeah Next time. Yeah, maybe I’ll get another pole. We’ll see Well, last week on the podcast we by the way, can you hear this is this loud? I’ve got a garbage truck outside my window
Tessa Murry (10:10.882)
You needed a third person.
Tessa Murry (10:15.775)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (10:19.332)
too much. Next time! Next time. Yeah. That’s good.
Tessa Murry (10:32.759)
Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (10:35.374)
and they are just banging. No, you can’t hear it? Okay. All right.
Tessa Murry (10:35.809)
of course.
Nope, your mic is doing a good job cutting that out. Usually I’ve got leaf blowers outside my window when we record the podcast, but knock on wood, not today.
Reuben Saltzman (10:47.214)
Sure. Okay. All right. My mic is doing a good job of noise canceling. Excellent. I can just barely hear you.
Tessa Murry (10:53.238)
It is, it is.
Reuben Saltzman (10:56.994)
All right. So like I was saying about a week ago, we did a podcast on case studies. It could have been two weeks ago. We’re doing well. It was supposed to be case studies. turned into a case study that you shared. It was a long one, but it was good. We got a lot of good, positive feedback about it. People really enjoyed that one and you’ve got more for us, right?
Tessa Murry (11:12.728)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (11:20.74)
I do. do. I’ve got a couple more and I’m thinking we’ll start off with one and I’ll try to move this along a little bit faster than the last one. We went down some rabbit holes and we got kind of detailed and in the weeds. for those of you, I was going to say for those of you, you fellow nerds out there listening to it, hopefully it scratched a niche you don’t get on other podcasts. Here we go. Okay, so.
Reuben Saltzman (11:33.73)
The rabbit holes are fun, Tess. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Tessa Murry (11:46.998)
The one I’m thinking about starting off with is actually, it’s kind of a recent one that came to me. It’s actually a homeowner that lives out in Indiana, central Indiana. And they heard about me through home inspector who was out at their house doing some work. I think this home inspector also installs radar mitigation systems. And so this homeowner had all these different kind of house issues going on, was talking to this inspector and the inspector said,
You know, I think you need a building scientist and recommended me thanks to the podcast they listened to. that was pretty cool. That was awesome. So anyways, this homeowner bought a 2002-ish house less than 10 years ago, like maybe five to 10 years ago. And before they moved in, there was a pre-inspection done on it.
Reuben Saltzman (12:25.176)
Sweet. Nice.
Tessa Murry (12:43.596)
The sellers got a pre-inspection, so they got that report. And then when they decided to buy it, they had another home inspection. Before they moved in, they did extensive remodeling. They kind of did all new kitchens, bathrooms, a whole bunch of stuff. They move into the house, and six months after living in the house, they had some kind of water leaking issues at some piping. They called out a plumber, and the plumber said,
Well, you know, I can’t really fix this. This is an issue. This is defective piping material, and this would never pass. And you basically, the fix for this is to replace all the water distribution piping in the house. Turns out it’s PEX. It was some kind of PEX piping with aluminum connectors, I guess.
Reuben Saltzman (13:29.368)
What?
Tessa Murry (13:41.025)
Oops, did I lose you?
Tessa Murry (13:49.79)
internet went out. Hey, did you lose me?
Reuben Saltzman (13:56.302)
Lost you for a minute there. What I heard was it’s it was packs. It was some type of packs piping
Tessa Murry (13:58.52)
Sorry, okay.
Tessa Murry (14:02.782)
Yes. Yeah. Okay, I’ll keep talking. Hopefully this recording software can fix some of these issues. Shoot, it says my internet is not working right.
Tessa Murry (14:17.748)
There you are. Okay, I’ll keep going. Hopefully the software can edit this part out. Okay. Okay. So it turns out it was some sort of pex piping and it had like aluminum connectors, I think. And it’s interesting to me because shout out to John Bolton, home inspector here in Florida, who presents
on this very issue of all sorts of problems that are being discovered and also, I think, hidden and buried with pecs and other types of plastic piping. So this homeowner, after they had spent a bunch of money remodeling their house and had two inspection reports done, they moved in, ended up opening up all their walls and replacing all of their water distribution piping in their house. Okay, so that’s one headache.
Reuben Saltzman (14:58.093)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (15:14.422)
They did a bunch of other things to this house too. New roof. They put on some new siding. They did a lot of things. So anyways, fast forward. This homeowner has an at home office and was resting his feet against the exterior wall because his desk was against it. How many of us have done that before? And one day he dropped his pencil and went down and noticed that
There was like a soft spot in the wall where he had been resting his feet, like there was a divot in the wall. And he’s like, this is weird. He started poking around and realized that the dry wall was all soft. So he was worried about moisture. They called a mold remediation company out. They opened up the wall and it was just all moldy. The back of the dry wall was molded, the insulation, the fiberglass bats had mold all over it. And some of the wall sheathing.
Reuben Saltzman (15:52.524)
Mm-mm.
Tessa Murry (16:09.77)
was black and had mold over it too and maybe even some rot. So I’ll show you a couple pictures. He sent me his report. Let’s see if I can share my screen here. Screen. Okay.
Tessa Murry (16:30.628)
this is the wrong screen.
I’m bringing it onto here. It wasn’t showing the other one. Okay. Oops.
Sorry, this is not great. The report has really small pictures. Can you see this, Ruben?
Reuben Saltzman (16:53.653)
All I can see is your calendar.
Tessa Murry (16:56.228)
Okay, never mind. Well, okay, we’re just gonna forgo that.
Reuben Saltzman (16:59.842)
No, try it again. If I’m going to edit the podcast, I’m going to edit twice. So take your time.
Tessa Murry (17:06.484)
Yeah, I’d rather not but let’s see stop sharing. Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (17:10.872)
Just stop the share and do the share again.
Tessa Murry (17:17.358)
Well, okay.
Tessa Murry (17:26.308)
Let me find this report again. Overmediation. Okay, let’s see. Share, screen.
Tessa Murry (17:39.136)
Okay, here we go.
So I’m going to zoom in because these pictures are really small.
Reuben Saltzman (17:44.11)
- Yeah.
Tessa Murry (17:48.868)
So here’s pictures. removed, they opened up the wall. You can see all the mold growing on the back of the sheetrock. Mold in the insulation. It’s pretty extensive. So they ended up opening up the majority of this wall that he had his desk on. And then they went into the next room over and did the same thing and found mold in that wall.
Reuben Saltzman (17:54.89)
Okay.
Reuben Saltzman (18:10.463)
gosh, and it looks like it’s all around a window.
Tessa Murry (18:14.732)
Yes. Okay, so you noticed one thing. So this is interesting. So there’s a lot of dark staining on the wall sheathing, exterior wall sheathing, underneath the window in his office. And you can see just kind of the deteriorated OSB and some of the mold on the framing. But there’s also just, I mean, when they open up that wall, there’s mold everywhere else in the back of the drywall and that entire wall. So there’s
There’s damage to the wall sheathing underneath the window and kind of across the wall and there’s mold everywhere else as well, even though the OSP doesn’t look moldy. So that’s pretty interesting. Okay, so he contacted me because he’s like, I don’t know what’s going on. We’ve done all these different things on the house and we’re trying to figure out the extent of the issue, why this occurred and is it happening anywhere else?
So asked him a bunch of other questions. And here’s kind what I found out. So they did some tuck pointing on the exterior and they also patched some missing mortar because their pre-inspection report had identified some areas of missing mortar around some of the window sills on the exterior, places where water could get kind of in around the windows. And so they had thought that, you know, they had fixed that issue and had patched all that missing mortar and sealed that up.
They also had problems with so that so the exterior let me back up a second the exterior on this house is a mixture of James Hardy siding and brick veneer Okay, so the this this exterior wall where his office is is south-facing and it’s on a second story above a garage and that whole exterior wall is brick veneer and it’s got a
Reuben Saltzman (19:52.855)
Okay.
Reuben Saltzman (20:07.882)
Okay.
Tessa Murry (20:08.676)
pretty big exposure. There’s no overhangs or anything like that. It’s like a gable wall. The other room next door to this that they also found mold and did the mold remediation and also has brick veneer, I believe, on the front of it as well. This second story. But a lot of the house is hardy all the way around the second story and there’s brick veneer around the first story of this house. If you can kind of picture that. There’s two types of cladding on the exterior.
Reuben Saltzman (20:33.026)
Yep. Yep.
Tessa Murry (20:35.488)
So when they bought the house, I think they replaced portions of the hardy because both the inspectors had pointed out that there was some deteriorated hardy siding on the exterior. And for various reasons, some of it was that there was improper spacing between the hardy and the roof or the hardy and other surfaces. And so it was tight where there should have been a little bit of a gap to allow water to drain out and the gap was missing.
And there were other pictures of like missing flashing details, missing kick out flashing, that sort of thing. Nothing was really said in the reports beyond there’s some deteriorated siding. it repaired by a qualified or licensed contractor. That’s kind of what was the extent of it in the report. So I believe the homeowner kind of replaced and repaired some of that. And I think he said that
Reuben Saltzman (21:24.056)
Yeah.
Tessa Murry (21:34.692)
the house did not have house wrap on the portions that they replaced the siding. So when they replaced the siding, I believe they put house wrap on it. And he was wondering like, is this a code issue? In 2002, did they require house wrap? And you know, this is Indiana. I don’t know. I don’t know what code was. So kind of looking into this, I’ve got two thoughts going on. One is that we could have,
moisture issues, water intrusion from a couple different sources. I’m thinking we’ve got water intrusion from the exterior that’s been going on in certain locations and is going on potentially, where we’ve got roof wall intersections missing flashings and two types of siding that we’ve got transitions that aren’t properly flashed or siding’s not properly installed. Common areas where you would…
think are weak points where we can get water intrusion into the exterior wall, especially with missing mortar and missing flashing. So that’s one thought that I have. But that doesn’t necessarily explain all the mold on the back of the sheetrock that made the sheetrock wet and soft when you don’t necessarily see rot on the OSB on some of those sections of exterior wall. So where is that evenly distributed kind of moisture?
that’s not showing up on the wall sheathing from like an exterior leak potentially, where is that coming from? And how is it getting there? So I asked some questions. It turns out I ended up talking with this inspector who had been out at this guy’s house and I asked him some more questions about just the construction methods in Indiana. And I was like, do you guys use polyvapor barriers out there? And you know.
here in a cold climate where it’s predominantly heating, we put a polyvapor barrier on the warm side of the wall. So you’d have sheetrock, poly, then insulation, then your wall sheathing. He’s like, no, I don’t think we do that here. So there’s no poly. So I’m like, okay, that’s good to know. And the other thing that’s interesting is that he mentioned that the brick veneer on this house
Tessa Murry (23:57.444)
that he actually had talked to the painter. There was a painter that came out to this house and apparently painted, this homeowner had the exterior painted and the brick was painted. And the painter told this inspector that this brick just soaked it up. Like it’s a super soft brick and it just took like twice as much paint as he had thought. And also I noticed in some of the pictures too that there isn’t proper, you know,
weep holes at the bottom of the brick where it meets the ground so there’s not proper drainage happening. Okay, so if the siding is not installed properly, if we don’t have proper gaps at the bottom, what are the chances that there’s not a proper air gap or air space behind this brick veneer so that water that gets behind it or moisture that gets soaked in the brick can properly dry out?
very unlikely that we have a proper airspace. I think we need at least one inch minimum, but two would be even better. And a lot of times the mortar from the brick gets stuck behind there and it provides capillary action or wicking right through to the wall sheathing or prevents water from being able to drain properly out the bottom. And if we don’t have weep holes, blah, blah, you get my point. we’ve got issues on this exterior wall that has brick veneer.
Reuben Saltzman (24:55.416)
Yep.
Reuben Saltzman (25:11.758)
total.
Tessa Murry (25:18.666)
And both of these rooms are south facing. So my other thought is that some of this moisture is what’s happening is the brick was soaking it up. Now, I don’t know what kind of paint they used, and I don’t know exactly when they did the paint. If the paint is a vapor barrier, well, then the brick wouldn’t, in theory, be soaking up the moisture, maybe as much. But before it got painted, potentially, we get heavy rain, the sun comes out, it gets hot in Indiana.
So that vapor drive is going to be pushing inward where it’s hot outside, cooler inside, air conditioning is going. We’ve got the sun beating down and so a lot of that moisture in that really soft brick is being driven through the exterior wall into the house. And we don’t have a polyvapor barrier on the backside of that sheetrock. So the moisture is just making its way right through the OSB, through the fiberglass and then
kind of hitting the backside of that drywall and condensing and creating a, yep, because it’s coal, a colder surface with the air conditioning and it’s condensing. And so, you know, year after year after year, this house is only 20 years old. We’ve got an extensive mold problem with soft sheetrock in these areas.
Reuben Saltzman (26:19.534)
because it’s cold there.
Reuben Saltzman (26:36.81)
Well, and not only that, but I’m also thinking you painted it now and now water can’t go through it one way or the other. If you have any water that does get behind it from improperly flashed windows and looking at these photos, it was clearly way worse below the window. You clearly have a leaking window. You got a problem there. Water gets in. It’s not the end of the world as long as water can get out.
Tessa Murry (26:47.182)
No.
Tessa Murry (26:57.294)
Thanks.
Tessa Murry (27:00.899)
Yep.
Reuben Saltzman (27:06.586)
and our building can dry out. But when you have the wall completely sealed, there is no drying potential. So the bulk water that gets behind it, when it dries out, it has to dry out to the inside of the building. And you have not provided a pathway for it to dry to the inside of the building. All it can do is condense on the drywall and it’s going to spread all along the inside of the wall. Right. OK.
Tessa Murry (27:07.876)
Yes.
Tessa Murry (27:14.05)
Yes.
Tessa Murry (27:21.208)
Yes.
Tessa Murry (27:27.982)
Yes.
Yeah, I would think so. you’ve got, you know, in theory, each bay is going to be separated by these studs, you know, so let’s just say one stud cavity has a lot of moisture in it, it’d be harder for that moisture to kind of, you know, diffuse through the wood stud to the next bay if it’s just, you know, evaporating into that bay cavity air and, you know, moving through convection, but it still can. And, and obviously, you know, you’ve got this whole brick
basically this big giant brick sponge on the exterior of the house, probably without proper venting and all of that and installation. so you’re just going to have diffusion happening through that entire wall system.
Reuben Saltzman (28:11.682)
Well, that and if you take a piece of drywall and you do one drop of water on the drywall and another drop and another drop and you keep doing that drop after drop, eventually that entire piece of drywall is going to be saturated. It’s going to hold all the moisture it possibly can. So, I mean, even if each bay is separated, mean, you saturate the part of the drywall that’s exposed to those bays.
Tessa Murry (28:29.38)
Yes. Yes. Good point.
Reuben Saltzman (28:40.066)
That moisture is going to spread through the rest of the drywall. Right?
Tessa Murry (28:42.774)
You’re right, Ruben. It’s like sticking the corner of a paper towel into a puddle of water. It just soaks it up and spreads. Capillary action. So I think there’s usually when it comes to a moisture issue or water issue, it’s not just one thing. Usually it’s a combination of things happening. Indiana gets cold too. So they also have their heat running in the wintertime. And you know,
Reuben Saltzman (28:47.01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tessa Murry (29:08.898)
I’m sure they don’t have a vapor barrier paint on the exterior, on the interior, and there’s no vapor barrier behind the sheetrock. So again, know, could in theory diffuse that way into the wall cavity and condense on the wall sheathing as well. But you know, I asked this inspector I was chatting with, he was very knowledgeable, and I’m super grateful to him for taking the time to answer a bunch of my questions. Shout out to Cameron if you’re listening. But you know, I asked him some more questions and
I was like, do you guys have a lot of quote new stucco homes out there with issues like the concealed water damage and all these problems that new stucco is known to have? he’s like, we don’t see a lot of stucco homes out here. Now we do have brick and stone and a lot of James Hardy, but not so much stucco. And I said, do you guys see issues with concealed moisture damage inside walls on brick or stone veneer houses? And he’s like, well, I don’t.
really know. I haven’t heard much about that. Doesn’t mean it’s not happening, but I mean, how would you know if you’re just doing a visual inspection, you know, and the wall isn’t soft and indented? How do you know? And so it kind of goes back to all that, you know, some of the classes you teach, Ruben, about how to identify, you know, water intrusion issues when you’re looking at a house and inspecting it.
Reuben Saltzman (30:22.466)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tessa Murry (30:35.432)
And this house just had all these red flags. was, you know, roof wall intersections that weren’t flashed properly, brick veneer that wasn’t installed correctly, James Hardy that wasn’t installed correctly. You know, and just the issues that can happen with a cladding that soaks up moisture and it hasn’t been installed properly on a house and all the vapor diffusion that can occur with that. So that’s kind of an interesting situation.
And, you know, they had, so they basically gutted these two rooms on these south-facing brick walls and, you know, re-insulated, re-sheet rocked. And fast forward now, he noticed after some really warm days, he was in his office and he looked at the baseboard and peeled it back a little bit and there was condensation happening behind the baseboard again.
and he looked at some of the exterior outlets and pulled them off, same thing, condensation there again. So he’s just like, no, it’s happening again. And where else is this happening? So.
Reuben Saltzman (31:36.374)
Yikes.
Reuben Saltzman (31:46.126)
And wait, what time of year was that happening?
Tessa Murry (31:49.9)
He had condensation this summer.
Reuben Saltzman (31:52.834)
He had condensation inside the house, on an exterior wall, on a summer day.
Tessa Murry (32:00.252)
Yes, yes, I believe so. Yeah.
Reuben Saltzman (32:06.936)
Huh.
That’s weird. Okay. So there’s so much moisture coming through the wall that it’s actually just making its way to the other side.
Tessa Murry (32:09.987)
Yep.
Tessa Murry (32:13.346)
Yeah, and I mean, there’s a lot of other.
Tessa Murry (32:23.332)
Potentially, potentially. So there’s, I mean, there’s more details here and I’m not hitting every detail. I took a lot of notes when I was chatting with this guy and looked at his reports and stuff. I’m not going to go through all of the details of the things that he’s told me about his house. But bottom line is we’ve got some moisture issues happening. And is there somebody at fault? You know, did painting the brick make it worse? Did it make it better? Is this problem?
Reuben Saltzman (32:24.366)
Okay, all right.
Tessa Murry (32:52.16)
still continuing even after the paint? How do we resolve it? Well, first of all, my thoughts are we need to figure out exactly what’s happening. And we’re going to have to do some more investigating and figure out, there more locations that this is occurring? Is it just behind the brick? Is it just under the windows? And as you know, there’s not really an easy way to do that. It’s going to be.
doing it, either in terms of moisture testing or opening up sections of walls to investigate. And once we can figure out, what’s happening? Is it a combination of moisture things or one thing? Then we could work with a contractor to address a potential scope of work to fix this. But how many houses out there potentially have this issue going on and just don’t know about it yet?
Reuben Saltzman (33:42.808)
Tons. That’s what I’m gonna say. Tons.
Tessa Murry (33:44.28)
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, neither inspector that, you know, inspected this house, you know, mentions any potential issues with concealed moisture damage in the walls. You know, they point out the missing flashing, the improperly installed hardy. But it’s like, have this repaired by a licensed contractor. There’s nothing more than that.
Reuben Saltzman (34:09.56)
Yeah, yeah. And a nice comment that we’ve used many times is have the area opened up and inspected for concealed damage. If you’re a home inspector, write that phrase down. That’s a really good phrase to put in your reports. Have it inspected for concealed damage and repaired as needed.
Tessa Murry (34:21.976)
Yes.
Tessa Murry (34:29.188)
Yeah. So if you’ve got an exterior wall that’s got brick and we’ve got lots of missing mortar and you’re pretty sure water’s been getting in around that window for a long time and you know that that house is a newer construction build. So it’s got less durable wall shaving material like OSB and it’s got a wall full of insulation so there’s no air movement or heat transfer going through it. You’re more likely to have rot and concealed damage.
much faster. And so to be more aware of that as a home inspector, what’s happening behind that wall? If water has been getting in there for 20 years, what does it actually look like? And maybe it’s not just patching the mortar, it could be more extensive than that. just sharing this on air so people can kind of think about if you’re a home inspector, how to maybe potentially think about these bigger issues that could be going on that you can’t really see.
And it’s not about scaring the potential buyer or being an alarmist. It is just hopefully educating them on what could be happening because this homeowner now is going to be, if this is an extensive problem happening in other locations besides just these two rooms, this is going to be an expensive issue to fix.
Reuben Saltzman (35:56.546)
Yeah, yeah, that sounds pretty terrible. I wouldn’t want that to be happening to my house. My goodness.
Tessa Murry (36:04.566)
Me neither. Me neither. So yeah, and I don’t know if a lot of these other locations that don’t have the extreme temperatures that we have up in Minnesota, if they use that kind of language about intrusive moisture testing or if they really do much of that with these types of cladding, the stone and the brick. I’m curious. I’m curious to know if you’re a home inspector in a
you know, more mild climate or a mixed climate. Is this something that you look for? Is this a known issue to you? Do you warn homeowners about it or recommend intrusive testing? I don’t know.
Reuben Saltzman (36:47.212)
Yeah, good question. Hard to say what people do outside of our yeah. Yeah. Email us podcast at structure tech.com. We would love to hear from you.
Tessa Murry (36:48.74)
I want to pull the audience.
Tessa Murry (36:56.204)
Yes, yes, yes. Also, I wouldn’t know of any, this is the challenging part too, finding contractors who are willing to kind of do this investigatory work and figure out what’s going on and then fix it too. And I know of consultants or firms that are there to kind of
Reuben Saltzman (36:57.582)
And I’ll…
Tessa Murry (37:23.692)
investigate and do water testing or open up the wall and say, yep, this is what’s causing the issue. We’ve got missing kickoff flashing here. We’ve got this happening here. But all they do is kind of diagnose the issue or do litigation. And then who fixes it? You need a good contractor to do that. you know, if you’re going to a state where they don’t have like, you know, they haven’t been through these stucco woes like, you know, we have in Minnesota, who are the contractors that can tackle these?
things. That’s challenging. That’s a real challenge to find out.
Reuben Saltzman (37:54.328)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You need, you need somebody, somebody like Mark, Mark Parley or yeah.
Tessa Murry (38:02.442)
Exactly. Yes. Shout out to Mark. I just chatted with him actually about this. I did. I did. Yeah. Yeah. So Mark Parley, for anybody listening, if you don’t know who he is, he’s a consultant who specializes in basically houses or structures, buildings with water issues. And he does a lot of investigatory work and litigation and stuff like that. So
Reuben Saltzman (38:08.654)
Did ya?
Good guy.
Tessa Murry (38:32.462)
So anyways, he’s a great resource and he’s seen all sorts of problems. So, he is.
Reuben Saltzman (38:36.396)
Yeah, he’s out of Iowa. He’s been on our podcast and he goes he goes all over the Midwest. I suppose he probably goes anywhere for the right price. I’d imagine, but.
Tessa Murry (38:46.664)
Yes, yep, he does. Yep. So he might be someone who can who’d be qualified to go out there and help this homeowner but
Reuben Saltzman (38:56.108)
Yeah, and something else I’ll throw out there is if you’re looking for somebody who does moisture testing in your area is to go through the exterior design Institute. You go to their I mean, you just Google that EDI exterior design Institute and they’ve got a zip code lookup feature on their website where you can find people who are trained to do stucco testing. But I mean, stucco testing is the majority of it. But once you’re trained to do that, I mean, you can do testing on
any type of wall colliding as far as I’m concerned. So another resource to find someone. Yep. Yep. Exactly.
Tessa Murry (39:29.73)
Yeah, it’s the same process, just a different material. Yeah. Yeah, good to know. So OK, so that was kind of my most recent interesting case study. I don’t know. We’re at 40 minutes already, Ruben. I think we’re done. That’s a wrap.
Reuben Saltzman (39:47.854)
We’re done. We’re going to have to save the next one. We’re not going to make this an hour and 20 minutes. Yeah, we’ll save one for next time. Yeah. OK. All right. Well, again, for the listeners, if you got any thoughts, commentary on this, if you’re in those climates and climate zones that Tessa talked about, you got certain things that you do in the area. We’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at podcast at StructureTech.com. Otherwise.
Tessa Murry (39:53.646)
That’s a wrap. Sounds good.
Reuben Saltzman (40:17.132)
We will catch you next time. Thanks for listening.
Tessa Murry (40:19.01)
Yeah. Thanks for listening, everybody.
Reuben Saltzman (40:21.73)
Take care.