You guys ever lose sleep at night?

The home inspection world is pretty fast paced with reports being done within a few hours to a day. Sometimes, due to the time constraints, it is always hard to choose the best wording or to include all observed deficiencies. Sometimes reports are submitted to the client and the next day you realize you forgot to include something minor which was observed on site. You guys ever get haunted about all the what ifs? I’d like to hear some thoughts.

I take lots of pictures for reference and,
I take my time. I generally don’t let the customers sense of urgency turn into my emergency… I will sleep on the report and open it later. Always find something to add or change, it never fails.

Sure, but as time has passed and my process becomes more repetitive , systematic and streamlined I find less and less thought being put into each inspection when completed. Following a system allows me to tweet it when bumps are found and also gives me the peace of mind that I checked everything … 2 1/2 years in business now and it runs much smoother than the first year when I stressed over every detail

That’s why I go over reports in the morning and drink coffee while its quite, no phone calls to deal with at 5.30 am.

I have been at this for 18 years and have never lost a wink of sleep and can look my self in the mirror every morning feeling good about what I accomplished the day before. I feel excited every morning just to know I am still breathing :wink:

I’ll go along with that…

Bet you don’t do 5 a day either…

Going on vacation Friday. As usual, the phone is off the hook!
Want work, plan a vacation!

Yipper I scheduled a week off in Sept going to Nashville for a reunion;-)

Charley, is that for your 75th Class Reunion? ;):mrgreen:

Hey you old fart its just my 52nd reunion for my deceased ship :p:D

at Your age its kinda hard to believe You remember the day before…just sayin…

Ouch!:slight_smile:

it was Charley’s turn in the barrel partner…

Hi Gary,

Perhaps you could tell us a bit more about your methods, in order to receive thoughts and advice.

Do you have a good report program that helps you finish them as quickly as possible?
If you forget something truly minor its probably best to just learn from that and move on. No one is infallible of course.

How long have you been doing this would be good to know as well.

I never do any reports at home. All of mine are done and printed on site. If they want it emailed, I just save it to PDF and off it goes. Pictures get saved to my web site immediately for anyone to reference. No work at home ever. It is always beer 30, or off to the strip club with Dan.

Hey Tom, thanks for the advice. I spend about 2 to 2.5 hours on site but because I am just starting out with my templates report writing is a pain. I take no notes and around 200 pictures per house. I’ll share a sample report with everyone when I get around to turning one of my real reports to a sample (removing house names, people names, etc on report).

I’ve been doing commercial building inspections including low income public housing for the past 10 years. Typically for those inspections you only make mention of things requiring more than $1,000 cost and everything else is routine maintenance.

I feel with these home inspections I am too detailed and its hard stating a deficiency and also the implications of the deficiency if left in current state without using too many words. I usually provide at least one picture per deficiency and sometimes 2-4 depending on related issues.

The sleep losing for me is trying to be a perfectionist and turning in a report the same day and then the next day realizing I forgot a small thing - improper dishwasher drain, etc. I guess it will get better over time like everyone is mentioning.

I only lose sleep the night before a concrete pour.

I did too when they were 200 + cubic yard foundations. :wink:

Lol, no rain in forecast today, poured footers and when last truck emptied… You guessed it!!! And yes I had plastic on site cause me has wisdom… From not being prepared in the past.
Only takes once and you never forget the site of that floor the next day… When the demo crew shows up with $$$ eyes

Watch a film called “Locke”.

Gary, over the years, on many threads, what keeps getting repeated again and again is that to avoid misses, inspectors do the inspection the same way every time. Everything in the same order. That way anything out of the ordinary really gets your attention.