HOME INSPECTIONS IN GRATIOT COUNTY

Outside Alma, St. Louis and Ithaca, nearly every home in the county is on a private well and septic system, and 9.7% of the county's homes are manufactured homes, which need their piers, tie-downs, skirting and underbelly checked; we do that regularly. There is no county-wide time-of-sale rule for wells and septic in Gratiot County; a few townships and most lenders have their own requirements, so give us the address and we will tell you what applies. The well and septic package starts at $500, or the well alone from $275 and the septic alone from $300. VA loans require a water test on any private well and FHA lenders ask for one in most cases. We pull the sample, send it to a certified lab and deliver the results in the format the lender wants, usually in 2 to 7 business days. The water test starts at $175 and covers coliform bacteria, nitrates, nitrites, lead, arsenic and more. The former Velsicol chemical plant in St. Louis is a federal Superfund site, which is one more reason buyers on a private well anywhere near it want the test.

Fieldstone basements, dirt crawlspaces and the underbelly of a manufactured home all stay damp, and damp is where mold grows. Thermal imaging and moisture readings are part of every home inspection, and where a crawlspace or the underbelly of a manufactured home is too tight or too wet to enter we send in our crawlspace robot (an Uplink Robotics inspection crawler; the maker says only 22 have been sold in Michigan, and three of them are ours) so it gets photographed instead of skipped. Our mold inspection (from $275) is done by an IAC2-certified inspector: thermal imaging and moisture meters to find the source, spore-trap air samples and surface samples, and accredited lab results that name the species. The EPA's rule of thumb is that anything that stays wet longer than 24 to 48 hours will usually grow mold, and a finished basement hides exactly that.