New Drywall, Wet Spackle, and What the Listing Photos Showed
I inspected a recently renovated single family in Brockton. The house was empty and the entire basement had been refinished.
Some of that work had been done within days of my inspection. Spackle and drywall were still wet when I touched them.
Here is what I could see and what I could not. New drywall, new ceilings, tile floors and trim throughout the basement, some of it not yet dry. The online listing photographs for this same property showed rusted column bases and apparent water on the basement floor. Neither condition was visible on the day I was there. The columns had been painted and the floor appeared to have been cleaned or touched up. I also found permits at the house for the addition that do not appear to have been closed out.
A finished basement removes the layer an inspector reads. Bare columns, bare foundation walls and a bare floor tell you where water has been and what it did to the steel. Once that is drywalled, painted and tiled, the record is gone and what is left is the finish. That is true whether the finishing was innocent or not. I can only report what is in front of me.
What I told the buyer to do. Contact the town building department and review the permit history for the property to determine what remains open, because permitted work on a flip is often incomplete. Ask the current owner directly about the history behind the repairs and the patching. Both of those get you information the finished basement no longer will.
My opinion is that new finishes in a basement are not automatically good news. Sometimes they are a genuine improvement. Sometimes they are the fastest way to cover the reason the basement needed attention in the first place. When the listing photos show one thing and the walkthrough shows another, the photos are the part of the record nobody thought to repaint.
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