Grease, hair, sanitary napkins and roots! These are things that build up over time and could be a potential hit to your wallet.
Don't get punched in your wallet! Why you should get a sewer inspection.
Detroit, Michigan- If you're on the market for a new house, beware old homes. Let's face it, the housing market in the Greater Detroit Area is hot, but this is no reason to skimp on the home inspection process. The average home inspection will catch the big stuff and even most of the smaller things, but unless you actually order the "Sewer Inspection" this is not a standard service offered by most home inspection companies. Imagine it's the day of your mortgage closing, you're so excited you skip breakfast because you can't wait to get to the title company. You get there and everyone sitting at the table has big smiles on their face as you sign all of the papers. At the end of your document signing your realtor hands you the keys to your new home!
You arrive at your new home the following day in your U-Haul with the first load of all your belongings. Finally after a few trips you've got all your stuff moved in and now you begin to unpack. The moving process can be daunting, but you don't mind it because this is finally the place you'll be calling home for years to come. You get everything unpacked and you and your spouse begin to make plans to call up some friends and family for a house warming gathering. You make a list of people and you begin planning. About a week goes by and you're getting closer to your house warming party day and your spouse is in the shower. Suddenly you start smelling a foul odor coming from within your house. At first you think perhaps it's a smell from the neighborhood and it will pass. But as the smell continues to fill your nostrils you begin to suspect it's actually coming from within your house. You search all over the first floor, maybe it's something in the garbage? So, you take out the garbage but to no avail, the scent is still present and becoming more pungent as time goes on. Your spouse is in the shower and yells out to you to grab a towel from the dryer in the basement, so you lovingly jump to your feet to run down into the basement only to discover that there is a lake of raw sewage between you and the dryer with that towel your spouse asked you to get. What do you do?
Besides you having to tell your spouse they're going to have to air dry, now you've got to call a plumber out. The service call alone is $65-$150 for them to show up, they bring in a big machine with a basket holding a cable of some sort and they pop the cap off your cleanout in the basement and they're down there doing something that sounds like it's gonna cost you a lot of money. Sure enough after about an hour the plumber comes back up in his rubber boots that smell like foul sewage and informs you that your sewer line is collapsed and unless you want to a lake of poop in your basement you're gonna have to schedule a time with him to come out and dig up the line and replace it. Dig ups start at $4,500 and can go as high as $12,000.
The point of this story is before you buy your home, order a Sewer Inspection from Pre Closing Inspection and avoid the pitfall of getting punched in your wallet.