Charlie Bellefontaine thought it would be cool to become a home inspector. He thought the same thing about becoming a firefighter and paramedic in the 1980s, his career before starting Chicagoland Home Inspectors.
Both checked two important boxes for Bellefontaine: They fulfilled the cool factor and allowed him to help people.
“It sounds corny, but I really believe in empathy and the value of helping other human beings,” he said in an interview.
Bellefontaine lived somewhat of a double life for a while, working as a firefighter and paramedic for the Village of Northbrook, a northern Chicago suburb, and starting his home inspection business in 1993.
One day, he might have helped to deliver a baby in the early morning for a couple who couldn’t make it to the hospital. The next, he could be sniffing out a list of 70 issues found in a home.
That's right, 70.
“This seems like more of a Sherlock Holmes thing,” Bellefontaine said about the pull to be a home inspector. “I get to figure stuff out — that, I like to do.”
He’s carved out a reputation based on challenging the status quo. Bellefontaine serves as president of the Illinois Association of Home Inspectors and coaches others on running a business. The aforementioned list of 70 issues is a very real number and is the average length of the reports his 15 home inspectors give to homebuyers. The lists document everything from the minor to the major, from a drywall crack to missing cover plates.
Other inspectors, he said, stick to a short list of 15 major issues, spotted and jotted down in an hour. His inspectors visit one home a day and stay an average of three hours, heading back to the office to write the report (never on site, he said).
“If I do my job right, then my client can make an educated decision,” said Bellefontaine. “If I don’t, then they’re making a naïve decision.”
In the homebuying process, a home inspection is typically done on a for-sale home after the seller accepts an offer from the buyer. At this time, the buyer can back out of the transaction if the home is found to have too many costly issues or if the buyer and seller cannot resolve the issues through negotiations.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What should buyers look for during a showing?
The No. 1 thing that is going to be harmful to the home is water entry. You can buy thermal imagers off Amazon that connect to your cellphone for just a couple hundred bucks.
These are the kind of tools I’d like to encourage real estate agents and homebuyers to invest in. They’re not going to be as detailed as the equipment that we use, but man, they’re going to point out problems.
If you can go underneath the bathroom and kitchen, and you start seeing cold spots up in there, take a picture of it. Send it to me. I don’t know how to get that message out to buyers.
They should also bring a bright flashlight with them when they’re searching through the house. This is an old painter’s trick. We take the flashlight, shine it right up the wall or on an angle or on the ceiling. When you shine the light on an angle, every single flaw in that wall comes out.
If somebody has made a single repair, that’s one thing, but if it looks as if they’ve put mud on there five or six times, now we need to know: When was it done? Who did this? How often was it done? Why was it done?
Electrical connections are also a big thing, and you can see that just where the wires come into the house. We get a lot of people that do electrical upgrades with no permits, and if you don’t have a permit to upgrade the electric, it may not be done right.
Here, in the city of Chicago, you can search for building permits. I show my clients how to do this.
What should buyers always have done during an inspection?
Sewer scoping. Somebody puts a camera down the sewer lines, and these old clay sewer lines, 90% of the time, we find roots and displacements. Most of the time, it’s still going to function OK, but if the roots keep growing, then eventually they’re going to clog up, and then we get food, paper, and everything else coming back up.
We can figure out what the maintenance schedule is going to be on this. The worst I’ve seen is people who had to get it addressed every six months, but most of the time it’s every couple to five years.
How can a buyer save some cash?
We end up charging $260 to do a radon test. You can pay less than $30 to do one yourself in a house that you own or occupy. It’s a pretty significant price difference.
The kits are just as accurate as the expensive machines that we use. And our people have to be licensed to do a radon test in somebody else’s house.
For a full basement, radon mitigation costs somewhere around $1,500. If there’s a crawl space, it’s usually about $2,500. The state of Illinois also monitors every test that’s done by a professional or a technician. And we have access to all that stuff by ZIP code.
More than 100 tests were done in a ZIP code, and not one test came in over the action level. I can’t tell somebody to pay me $260 for basically a 0% chance, but they still need to know that every home is different. There’s always a possibility.
So, they've moved in. What should buyers do now?
Always get the ductwork cleaned. It’s one of the top priorities, especially if the house was built before 1978. I’m a huge advocate for this because we don’t know whether there was any construction that was done or if the home has lead paint. If you have a lot of lead debris inside your ductwork, every time you turn that fan on, you’re blowing that lead dust out there.
Change your locks, the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and you’re going to laugh, but the toilet seats. I’m sorry, I’m a dork! I actually say that.
What is your home like?
My wife's great-great-grandfather built our house in 1894, and the family has lived in it ever since. I moved in there, and it was so drafty that you could literally fly a kite inside that house.
It was so cold. The heat was horrible, so we decided to gut the house, tear the roof off, make it a little bigger, insulate the daylights out of it, and put in new heating, ductwork, electric, plumbing, everything.
What do you enjoy doing outside work?
[My wife and I] enjoy the Chicago Botanic Gardens. We've had a membership for a long time. It’s just a beautiful place to walk. People don’t realize it’s part of the Chicago Park District, so talk about a gem that’s so affordable.