The #1 cause of accident and injury around the home

Posted on April 30, 2012 by russelray

When I was a general contractor in Texas many decades ago, I had to know about everything that went into building a house — concrete, electricity, plumbing, heating and cooling, brickwork, landscaping….

We were cross-trained. If the plumber called in sick one day, guess who did plumbing work that day? We also checked on our subcontractors’ work. If it was wrong or not up to standards, the subcontractors were called out on it and had to redo it.

From what I have been able to determine here in San Diego, general contractors are mainly paper pushers intent on keeping the project on time and on budget. They don’t actually do any of the manual labor, though, which could explain why virtually everything built in San Diego (and even California, probably) never is completed on time and on budget.

Recently I discovered a professionally landscaped property:

Professional landscaping

See that walkway in the center of the picture leading around to the side of the house? It is created out of concrete sections with gaps between the sections. Vegetation is growing in those gaps.

As a home inspector, I would note that this walkway is one long trip hazard. According to my insurance agent, and many hospital emergency room reports, trip hazards are the number one cause of accident and injury in our homes.

I love this type of landscaping but that doesn’t absolve me of my duty to warn my Clients that it really is not appropriate, especially if there will be young children, elderly, or handicapped people living in the home. For the first six months of ownership, be extremely careful and attentive until you have a great familiarity of the idiosyncracies of your home that could cause injury.

Interested in photography?
Visit my photography blog at Russel Ray Photos.

What a home inspector says DOES matter!

Posted on April 26, 2012 by russelray

When I started my home inspection business in October 2001, one of the first things my attorneys cautioned me about was saying too much at the inspection. “Let your written words tell what you know or discovered.”

Back in 2008 I got a phone call from a very unhappy real estate agent basically telling me that I should have shut up and just done my job. Here’s the problem, though. If I just shut up and do my job, and something goes wrong down the road, something significant, everyone connected with the transaction will be sued. It’s the law of lawsuits: “Sue everyone to maximize the monetary results.” It often works because everyone will settle out of court, which is done by throwing various amounts of money at the plaintiff.

Part of my job as a home inspector is to try to create a relationship with my Clients so that if they ever need help with something, they will call ME instead of their attorney! I want the opportunity to resolve any problems, or perceived problems, BEFORE they call their attorney. The problem with creating relationships is that they are very difficult to create during the course of a 3- or 4-hour inspection.

So what caused the phone call from the agent? The house didn’t have any big-ticket problems, but she told me that my Clients had canceled the purchase based on what I said about the vegetation. The particular vegetation in question was this stuff:

It’s called dodder, and right now the hills are alive with it.

This particular species is California dodder (Cuscuta californica), also called chaparral dodder. Dodder is considered a noxious weed here. Looking like a mass of spaghetti, it is a parasitic vine. The leaves are very small scales along the stems, and the flowers and berries are also very small. It is not green because it has no need for photosynthesis since it gets all its nutrients from the host, which it will eventually smother and kill.

Local dodder names throughout the world include devil’s guts, devil’s hair, devil’s ringlet, hailweed, hairweed, hellvine, pull-down, strangleweed, and witch’s hair. That pretty much tells you what people throughout the world think of it.

The property I inspected was in central San Diego and had beautiful canyon views. However, the property and the canyon were covered with dodder. When my Client asked me if I knew what all the orange stuff was, I told him that it was dodder. I also told him that it is considered a noxious weed and is very difficult to remove because it gets a stranglehold on the host plant. I renovated a large property in Mt. Helix from 1999 to 2001 that was covered with dodder. I wound up chopping the host plants down and starting all over with the landscaping.

My Client didn’t buy the property because of the dodder. He told me that although the house had a beautiful canyon view, the dodder throughout the property AND the canyon looked bad, and since he would not be able to remove the dodder on city property in the canyon, he decided to look elsewhere for a home.

As far as I know, this is the only property I ever inspected where the purchase was canceled because of vegetation. What a home inspector says DOES matter!

Originally posted at Russel Ray Photos as
“The hills are alive with…. Dodder?“

Interested in photography?
Visit my photography blog at Russel Ray Photos.

The rain doesn’t mean that we don’t still live in a desert

Posted on April 15, 2012 by russelray

Water, water everywhere, or is it?

The California Department of Water Resources has put together historical facts and trends about droughts in California. It is a good resource to gain a greater perspective on the most recent droughts.

Just because it’s been raining a lot these past few weeks doesn’t mean that we don’t still live in a desert.

Interested in photography?
Visit my photography blog at Russel Ray Photos.

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Protecting your home from wind-driven wildland fires

Posted on February 2, 2012 by russelray

“Protecting your home from wind-driven wildland fires using landscaping, vegetation, and home maintenance” is a PDF e-book with 25 pages and over 125 photographs.

I wrote it after some Texas prairie fires decades agoago and updated it after the 1988 Yellowstone fires, the 1991 Oakland Hills fires, the Southern California wildland fires of October 2003 and October 2007, and the Texas fires of 2011.

With warmer weather already here in San Diego, and the type of brush we have on our hillsides, wildland fires are always a possibility. If you or someone you know lives in an area subject to wildland fires (and that’s about 90% of America), please help me distribute this little guide to your family, friends, and business associates.

We can be proactive in using landscaping, vegetation, and regular and easy home maintenance to provide the initial protection for our own homes which then makes it much easier for fire fighters to protect our homes if we are forced to evacuate.

Download a free copy at About Homes.

It’s a large file (3.6 MB), so be patient while it downloads, especially if you’re on dial-up or other slow Internet speeds.

Please distribute it far and wide with my blessings.

Do your plant due diligence — Part three

Posted on January 27, 2012 by russelray

Any guesses where the following picture was taken?

If you cheated and said that it was somewhere in San Diego County just because I live in San Diego County, you’re a good cheater, the best.

San Diego’s temperatures define it as a Mediterranean climate. Its rainfall defines it as almost a desert, and many parts of the County actually are a desert. Basically, San Diego is a Mediterranean desert, so almost anything will grow here if you provide it with its basic water needs.

People who move to San Diego often find that they are homesick for the plants, trees, and flowers they had back home. What they wind up doing is landscaping their home so that it looks like “back home.”

Therein lies a problem, though.

San Diego averages about 11 inches of rainfall a year. Most of the water for its three million residents comes from the Colorado River and the San Francisco East Bay Delta. People who plant lush, tropical landscaping in San Diego are impacting the water supply for the whole region, and it’s not going to get better.

When I inspected the property shown in the photograph, I mentioned that the tropical landscaping was inappropriate for a desert climate and specifically recommended that they ask the Seller for copies of the water bill. They might be shocked at how high the water bill was.

Not responsible for advice not taken Several months after close of escrow, my Clients called me wondering if I had broken something during the inspection because the water bill was so high. I didn’t even need to pull up the pictures of the property to remind me of their house. Some memories last a lifetime.

I asked them if they had gotten copies of the water bill like I recommended. They didn’t.

I explained again about their tropical landscaping and told them to call the water company and get the monthly amounts for the previous years. I bet they would be similar. They did. They called me back to apologize for accusing me of breaking something and told me that the water bill had been that high for several years. No surprise to me. That’s mature tropical landscaping.

Moral of this story? It’s always worthwhile to ask the Seller for copies of the gas, water, and electricity bills to determine if you’ll be able to live in the house after you buy it. If the Seller refuses to provide them, you can always (in my experience) get the amounts from the utility companies if you explain to them that you’re thinking of buying the house.

Do your plant due diligence — Part two

Posted on January 26, 2012 by russelray

If you missed Part one, find it here: Do your plant due diligence — Part one.

Whenever I do a home inspection, one of the first things I do is simply walk around the property looking at things. One day I took this picture:

The Client buying that property told me on the phone while scheduling the inspection that he had some concerns about sagging floors. No doubt….

Those lime-green plants in the two small sqaures are cyperus, a plant that needs a lot of water to survive. In order to get that water in San Diego with its Mediterranean desert climate, someone has to water them. They won’t survive on our annual average of eleven inches of rain.

Those two square planters are not planters at all. That’s where one would crawl under the house — plumbers to fix leaks, home inspectors to check out the foundation and plumbing, and children to escape punishment.

I couldn’t get under the house but I was pretty sure that the area in that corner — the kitchen and dining room inside — had floor problems. I was correct. All I could do is tell my Client what I thought was going on because I don’t have the luxury of tearing out the Seller’s plants while doing an inspection.

Moral of the story? Just because you see some dirt doesn’t mean you should plant something there. If you do plant something there, do your plant due diligence to determine how big it gets and how much water it needs.

Join me tomorrow for part three.

Do your plant due diligence — Part one

Posted on January 25, 2012 by russelray

Several decades ago, my wise old grandmother introduced me to cactus and succulents. The rest is history.

I’ve taken that interest and developed it into a passion for landscaping, a passion that complements my passion for real estate and my career as a home inspector. My love of plants and real estate has developed into an intense interest to help people understand how the wrong tree, bush, or ground cover can have devastating effects on their home, effects that might not become visible until many years later.

Here in San Diego, virtually anything will grow because of our Mediterranean temperatures. With the proper amount of watering, those things will grow tall and wide. Some that you’ve never seen bloom before will bloom.

When I was growing up in South Texas, I was quite proud of my Norfolk Island Pine (also called a Star Pine) that had grown to six feet in ten years. Here in the canyons of San Diego, it’s not uncommon to find Norfolk Island Pines that are 35 or 40 feet tall, also in ten years.

The umbrella tree, or schefflera, is the same. We Texans were proud if they were six feet tall and still had all their lower leaves. Here in San Diego, they not only grow to 20 feet tall, but the darn things bloom! And beautiful blooms they are, too.

Unfortunately, because everything will grow here, people plant plants in the strangest places. Notwithstanding our desert environment with an average of 11 inches of rain a year, people will water their plants to make sure they grow big and strong.

Here’s an example of a ficus tree which not only grew big and strong, but its root system grew wide and destructive:

That tree was not at the home that I was inspecting; it was next door! Yet it had not only destroyed the foundation of the home in the picture, it had also destroyed the foundation of the home to the left, the home that I was inspecting.

Moral of the story? Don’t fall prey to the grocery stores that sell the cute, little ficus trees at all times of the year. Those cute, little ficus trees grow to be big, monster, destructive trees. So do many other small plants commonly sold in grocery stores, discount stores, home improvement stores, and, of course, at plant nurseries.

Join me tomorrow for part two.

Real Estate Solutions by Russel Ray

Unlocking the secrets of your home

Category Archives: Flora

The #1 cause of accident and injury around the home

What a home inspector says DOES matter!

The rain doesn’t mean that we don’t still live in a desert

Protecting your home from wind-driven wildland fires

Do your plant due diligence — Part three

Do your plant due diligence — Part two

Do your plant due diligence — Part one