Have you heard the story about the homeowner who was saved from burning in his own house by the building inspector?
Thinking the coals in his barbeque grill were cold, a Plainfield man pulled the grill into the garage after a 4th of July celebration and went to bed. Unfortunately, the not-quite-dead embers rekindled. Thanks, in part, to a local building rule requiring that a garage under a living space be drywalled and taped, the blaze was contained long enough for the homeowner to awake and escape unharmed.
“I think we had two incidents like that,” says Plainfield building official Ray Sarnowski, who credits a local regulation — and its enforcement — for saving lives.
New home buyers may agonize over whether to buy hardwood or tile floors, Corian or granite countertops, but they depend upon municipal officials like Sarnowski and his staff to verify those homes are safe and structurally sound.
They are among the local building inspectors who, despite well-publicized lapses, are a first-line of defense against shoddy construction.
A building inspector is charged with “life, health and safety as per code,” Sarnowski says. He and his staff monitor construction from the digging of the footing to the final occupancy permit to make sure a residence complies with local rules for structural quality and general safety, including fire safety. It is their job, for example, to see housing is built so that a sewer will not shear off after the foundation has settled in a year or that a builder is not omitting the firewall between town homes.
“We look at workmanship, to a degree,” says Sarnowski, but only to make sure it meets code.
With Plainfield’s population soaring from 13,000 just two years ago to 20,000 today, the village building department is one of the busiest inspection offices in the metropolitan area.
By the end of October, it had supervised the start of about 1,300 new dwellings this year, six times the total number built in Plainfield in 1992. In addition, its inspectors are responsible for overseeing the exploding number of new commercial buildings as well as remodeling projects from large deck additions to whole house renovations. All this in an area where the DuPage River has flooded periodically and a tornado destroyed 600 homes and killed 30 people in 1990.
To oversee this boom, Sarnowski heads an office of five full-time building inspectors, three part-time plumbing and two part-time electrical inspectors and five scheduling assistants.
Most weekday mornings they meet at 7:30 in village hall offices to get their assignments before fanning out across the burgeoning town as inspectors Ken Goska and Joe Baber did one recent morning.
Goska walked through the skeleton of a future four-bedroom house on a rough framing check, one of a minimum 23 inspections the village requires.
Rough framing is one of the most important inspections “because [the framing] will carry every load in the house,” Sarnowski says. Before the frame is covered by drywall, the inspector checks that it is strong enough to withstand conditions ranging from high winds (hurricane clips are required in Plainfield) to the extra weight of heavy snow.
Goska methodically surveyed components such as wall studs, major beams, floor joists, windows and ductwork to verify they were the right size and strength and were properly secured. He paid particular attention to roof rafters and beams, which his boss, Sarnowski, calls “critical.”
Goska measured beams to make sure they could accommodate the required insulation. He checked placement of the heating and air conditioning ductwork to make sure no crucial wood was notched so deeply by HVAC installation that the building frame was compromised. He examined windows to make sure they had the proper glass and, importantly, that every bedroom had a window big enough for a firefighter to crawl through.
At the end of his 30-minute inspection, he huddled with builder Jim Weck of JK Construction, who had quietly observed the process. Although Goska had several suggestions for Weck, he said they were minor, and gave the builder a green sticker to post on a board easily seen from the street, a visual record of inspections passed.
On the same day in a different subdivision, Baber, also armed with a clipboard and tape measure, conducted a final building inspection of a house by builder Tom Wilson.
He began by eyeballing the numerals on the exterior of the house to determine if they were the requisite 5 inches high and visible from the street. Baber then walked the exterior of the building, stooping at one point to verify that a water shutoff box was not buried under sod or concrete. He examined the front brick for weep holes and to make sure there was caulking between brick and other exterior siding. He reached under the exterior of the fireplace chimney to see if it was properly finished and scanned the top of the chimney for a spark arrester, a metal cap to keep sparks from the roof.
Baber surveyed window wells to see if they were clear of debris, but was unfazed by the chipped and somewhat ragged concrete around a basement window. A bit unsightly, perhaps, but not a code violation, he said.
Inside, Baber walked the finished house from top to bottom, examining joists in the basement, testing railings and guardrails on the stairs and poking his head into the attic to check the insulation.
He worked from a 50-point checklist, which at times might seem nitpicky, especially to a builder and buyer eager for a closing. Among the requirements for homeowner safety and fire protection: The sump pump cover is fastened down; the furnace has a filter; there is a handrail for three steps from the garage into the house; and lights in closets must have globes.
In the basement, Baber checked the bolts on the columns, studied the supports for the ductwork and the grouting for the beam pockets. On the main level, he examined the fireplace for a fire screen, ascertained the flooring was completed and that the door between the garage and house met a fire code requirement. Upstairs, the inspector checked exhaust fans in bathrooms without windows and pulled up register covers to look for debris. As he walked downstairs, Baber pointed out that the height of the guardrail and railing meets the village requirements, unlike one in a house he inspected the day before.
“It was the wrong height so they have to fix it,” he said.
Although there is no light in the attic, an omission the builder will have to correct so the inspector can check insulation, the house is mostly ready. A buyer for the house wants an electric, not a gas, range in the kitchen, however, so a new line will have to be run in the kitchen, which means yet another inspection.
Though most municipalities in Illinois use Building Officials and Code Administrations (BOCA) standards, each may have unique building rules and hiring requirements for inspectors. Sarnowski, as well as several of his inspectors, are former carpenters, for example. All have at least some BOCA training. All are expected to know Plainfield’s regulations.
Plainfield’s minimum of 23 inspections is roughly typical for its area. Among the inspections for each residence is the foundation, the backfill around the foundation, sewer, water and electrical service, underground plumbing, the proper installation of the driveway and of insulation.
The scrutiny is aimed at catching mistakes by hurried or bad builders, but there can be honest disagreements about what constitutes “meeting code.”
“A building official can interpret the code,” Sarnowski says, and may request a wall with a deeper footing or one with more steel in it when a basic wall will not work.
“Interpretation” is a tricky business and can be especially so for builders who work in several municipalities. An architect who works with residential building says some building inspectors impose a cookie-cutter understanding of construction and do not — or cannot — recognize a solution that surpasses basic requirements.
And in one project, an inspector insisted on having a basement wrongly insulated, he said.
“A good inspector is a combination of a good mechanical individual with a good instinct for learning from the academic end of it,” says custom builder Anthony Cesario, president of Cesario Builders, based in Warrenville.
“Some inspectors have their hot buttons, they look for things that have been problems in the past,” Cesario says. So, to speed the building process and avoid misunderstandings and the delay of reinspection, the builder says he tries to “partner” with the local officials to anticipate how they want things done.
Despite these efforts, mistakes can still occur.
Steve Preins is managing director of the Professional Home Inspectors Institute of Chicago in Highwood and a former private home inspector.
He recalls finding a potential safety hazard in the electric wiring of a year-old house when a family was getting ready to sell. In another new-construction house that he was inspecting for the buyers, Preins discovered there was no insulation in the attic.
He says such lapses are most likely due to the “peicemeal” or spotcheck approach to inspection and the recent pace of home construction rather than any “intentional neglience” by builder or inspector.
“Many of these guys are way overloaded,” he says. “They just don’t have the time and the manpower.”
Not so in Plainfield, says Sarnowski, who has just hired one more inspector.
“We work as a team,” he insists. “We make very few mistakes.”
