Before you buy
What to Check on a House Repaired After 2004
Frances and Jeanne hit this coast three weeks apart in September 2004. If your house was repaired in the two years that followed, there are specific things worth establishing before a window quote means anything.
Tell us the address and whether the house is occupied year round. On this coast the second answer changes the recommendation more than the first.
Pull the permit history first
The county building department holds it and it is generally obtainable. It tells you what was supposed to happen.
It does not tell you what did happen. Work from that period was carried out at volume, at speed, and under a shortage of materials and skilled labor. Some of it was never permitted at all.
Then establish what is physically there
The questions that matter for a window job are narrow.
- Were any openings altered, infilled or resized during the repair?
- What is the jamb substrate now, as opposed to what it was originally?
- Were previous fixings set into sound material?
- Is there evidence of water tracking that was covered rather than corrected?
Why this belongs before the quote
A fixed price given from the outside assumes the wall is what the file says it is. On this cohort of houses that assumption is not reliable, and the cost of being wrong lands in the middle of the installation.
A survey that opens up where there is doubt is slower and it is the reason our number holds.
Next step
Find out what is actually wrong with it.
An inspection, photographs of what we found, and a written scope. If the honest answer is that it can wait another season, that is the answer you will get.