Buying a home is a big investment. You should use a checklist when sizing up potential homes. In this article, we cover a home buying checklist for paint and stucco.

Paint and Stucco

The exterior of a home typically makes the biggest impression when you first view a potential buying opportunity. Many homebuyers, however, often make the mistake of looking at color schemes as the principal issue. In truth, a close review of the exterior of the prospective home can tell you a lot about the quality of the structure.

A person selling a home is not stupid. Before putting a home on the market, they are going to take steps to spiff it out to raise buyer interest and the rate you are willing to pay. There is nothing devious about such conduct. It is natural to want to put your best foot forward and a person selling a home isn’t going to act differently. This is why you want to take a close look at the exterior paint and stucco on a home.

1. The first thing to look for is peeling or flaking of paint on the exterior walls. If you see this in an obvious place on a wall, run for the hills because the house needs a total repaint. Typically, you are not going to find such obvious problems. Instead, you need to poke around behind bushes, up under roof overhangs and in nooks and crannies. If you find problems of this sort, it tends to mean the paint job on the home was not applied correctly. Once these problems start occurring, you can count on them getting worse over time.

2. The second thing to look for is stains around perforations in the paint. For instance, look for an area where bolts or nails penetrate a painted surface. If you see rust around the hole, you may be seeing an indication of poor maintenance. Even worse, you may be seeing an indication of a water drainage problem. Investigate such occurrences very carefully.

3. With stucco homes, you are typically going to find some cracking do to earth movement and temperature changes. As long as these areas are relatively small, you shouldn’t have problems patching them for a nominal price. The bigger problem, however, is if you find stains or soft spots on the bottom section of a stucco wall. This can mean there are problems with the drainage screen behind the stucco wall and water isn’t getting out. If water isn’t getting out, the stucco will continue to degrade and you may have a mold problem at some point. Both situations can be very expensive to fix.

4. The second item to check is soft or mushy sills at the base of the window. Often you can identify a soft sill by a “rotted” look, but make sure to run your hand across the sills with light pressure to see if there are any soft spots. If you find a problem, warning lights should be going off in your mind. A mushy sill means there is a water penetration problem. More importantly, it also means the problem has existed for some time. Long-term water problems can mean the existence of mold and mold can be an expensive problem to fix. If you are really interested in the home, demand an inspection paid for by the seller. If the seller refuses, walk away from the home.

When checking out perspective home buying opportunities, the exterior of the home should be looked at very closely. In this case, the merits of the home all come down to the details.

Offering Rental Apartments in Gurgaon in the heart of the city. Offers Apartments in Pinnacle Gurgaon and Furnished Apartments Gurgaon

To add a comment please login by clicking here