I am a home inspector in Salem Oregon. People have been paying me to crawl under and over homes since 2004. Before I was an independent home inspector/consultant I worked construction.  Drywall, framing, roofing, siding, basement/crawlspace waterproofing were all within my expertise.

When I bought my first home, I was still in construction, and I hired a local Salem, Oregon home inspector. He spent about 45 minutes in my 1950s home and said about a dozen words to me. He handed me a mess of check boxes and hard to read hand writing.  I was used to dealing with building inspectors and I really didn’t know what a home inspection was all about.  When I looked at that dude’s report it made very little sense to me.  I had no idea what was even going on. We moved in a few weeks later in November and the furnace wouldn’t work. It had been rigged with plumbers tape and a water heater thermocouple!! My home inspector had not mentioned the “custom,” furnace wiring. The evening of the first night in our new home was spent tearing the shower stall apart because the fixture and valve were so deteriorated it was impossible to take a shower. My home inspector didn’t mention the un-usable shower. Add those issues to some other pretty serious issues discovered in our first few days and you can imagine that I was not very impressed with home inspections as an industry. Then about a year later I heard about thermal cameras and how they were being used by inspectors.

I did some research and discovered that Infrared/thermography was a fantastic tool that was really not being used to a great extent. So I took some training, on home inspections and thermography and I got myself certified to do home inspections in the state of Oregon. Three years later I started my own business and I am loving what I do and the people with which I get to work.