The House the Listing Dated Wrong

Why this matters

The year a house was built decides more of a quote than most estimators admit: whether lead-safe work practices apply, whether a suspect material is likely behind a wall, how long demolition takes, which trade gets called. When the year is wrong, every one of those decisions is wrong with it, and nobody notices because the number came from a document. This case is a remodel quoted off a real estate listing that said 1985. The house was a 1962 ranch with a 1985 addition, and the wall the customer wanted opened was the original exterior wall of the 1962 house. The tech who caught it did it by reading the house rather than the paperwork, and the near miss it avoided was a reciprocating saw through a material nobody had identified.

The quote as first written

The customer had bought the house four months earlier. They wanted the wall between the kitchen and the family room opened into a wide cased opening, an outlet moved, and new flooring across both rooms. The office booked a quote visit and, from the listing the customer forwarded, entered "built 1985" on the ticket.

The first draft of the quote, written by the estimator from the booking and a few photos the customer sent, assumed a post-1978 house:

• Standard demolition of the wall with a reciprocating saw, debris to the dumpster.
• No lead-safe setup, because a 1985 house is outside the federal pre-1978 trigger.
• Tear out the existing vinyl flooring in both rooms and install new.
• An electrician to relocate one receptacle.
• One header, sized by the shop's usual practice for a bearing wall of that span, with an engineer's sign-off if the jurisdiction wanted one.

Two days and two people. Everything about it was reasonable for a 1985 house.

Reading the house, not the listing

The tech who did the walk had a habit the shop now trains: before measuring anything, spend ten minutes looking at what the house is made of, starting at the bottom. See related: How to Do a Legacy Materials Walk Before Quoting an Older House.

The basement under the kitchen. A concrete block foundation, a cast iron drain stack, and galvanized steel water supply piping with a couple of copper repairs. The main panel was a fuse panel, and a newer circuit breaker subpanel was mounted beside it, fed from it.

The crawlspace under the family room. A separate, shallower foundation of poured concrete, copper supply piping throughout, and sheathed plastic cable printed with a conductor size and "with ground." The joists ran a different direction from the basement's.

The kitchen floor. At the edge of a floor register the tech could see two layers below the current vinyl: an older sheet flooring, and below it a corner of small square tile, about 9 in across, with black adhesive. The family room had one layer of sheet vinyl on plywood.

The cable in the basement. Branch cable from the fuse panel was cloth-sheathed with no ground wire. The cable from the subpanel was plastic-sheathed with ground and ran toward the addition.

Taken one at a time, none of those proves a year. Taken together, they describe two buildings: one with a block foundation, fuse panel, galvanized supply, cast iron, cloth-sheathed cable and 9-inch tile, all of which are typical of houses built before the late 1960s, and one with a poured foundation, a breaker subpanel, copper and grounded cable, typical of the mid-1980s. See related: Dating a House by What You Find in It.

The public record. While still on site, the office pulled the county property record. It listed the house as built 1962 with an "effective year" of 1985, and a 1985 building permit for an addition. A common way a listing ends up wrong is exactly this: the listing pulls an effective or adjusted year, which assessors use to reflect a major addition or renovation, rather than the original construction year. The listing was not lying; it was reporting a different number.

The wall nobody had looked inside

The wall the customer wanted opened ran along the boundary between the two foundations. That made it the original 1962 exterior wall. The tech checked from both sides:

• On the kitchen side, the wall was plaster with many layers of paint at the trim.
• On the family room side, it was drywall. At the outlet he was asked to relocate, with the power off at the breaker and proved dead with a tester checked on a known live source before and after, he took off the cover plate and looked past the box edge with a flashlight. Behind the family room drywall, on the old exterior face of the wall, he could see the edge of a gray, hard, flat siding shingle with a slightly textured face, still on the wall.

  ORIGINAL 1962 HOUSE          1985 ADDITION
 +------------------------+------------------+
 | KITCHEN                | FAMILY ROOM      |
 | vinyl over sheet over  | vinyl on plywood |
 | 9 in tile + black glue |                  |
 |                        |                  |
 |   plaster, old paint ->|<- drywall        |
 |                       ||                  |
 |  old exterior wall -> ||<- cement siding  |
 |  (the wall to open)   ||   left in place  |
 +-----------------------++------------------+
 | BASEMENT               | CRAWLSPACE       |
 | block, fuse panel,     | poured, copper,  |
 | galvanized, cast iron  | grounded cable   |
 +------------------------+------------------+

When the addition went on, the builder had framed against the old exterior wall and drywalled over its siding instead of stripping it. Gray, hard, flat siding shingles on a house of that age are a common appearance of asbestos-cement siding. It was suspect, not identified, and the tech wrote it that way. See related: Cement Flue Pipe and Cement Board Products.

What changed in the quote

Once the year moved from 1985 to 1962 for the kitchen side and the wall itself, nearly every line of the quote moved with it.

Lead-safe work practices. The kitchen side of the wall and its trim are pre-1978 painted surfaces in target housing. Opening the wall disturbs far more than the federal minor-repair threshold of 6 sq ft per room inside, so the job falls under the EPA RRP rule (40 CFR 745 Subpart E) or the shop's state program where one is authorized: a certified firm, a certified renovator, the pre-renovation pamphlet, containment, cleaning verification and records. That was a staffing change as well as a setup change, since the first tech assigned was not a certified renovator. See related: EPA Lead RRP Rule for Contractors.

Testing before demolition. The siding inside the wall and the 9-inch tile with black adhesive both went to sampling by a licensed asbestos inspector before any demolition, at the customer's arrangement and cost, with the shop's quote split into a testing stage and a work stage. If either came back positive, its removal would go to a licensed abatement contractor under a separate contract, and the quote said so.

Flooring. The kitchen floor would not be torn out to the subfloor until the tile result was in. The quote added an alternative of installing new flooring over the existing layers in the kitchen if the tile was positive, which avoids disturbing it, with the floor height change at the doorway noted.

Electrical. The receptacle move was on a circuit fed from the fuse panel with ungrounded cloth-sheathed cable. Relocating it was now a question for the electrician about what the new receptacle could be fed with and what protection it needed under the code as adopted locally, not a simple extension. See related: Two-Prong Outlets and the Ungrounded House.

Time. The two-day estimate became a testing visit, then, if results were negative, three days of work including containment setup, cleaning and verification. If positive, the work would follow the abatement contractor's schedule.

The customer was told plainly: the listing year was the addition, the wall was original, two materials in it and under the kitchen floor needed testing before anyone cut, and the old paint meant the shop worked under lead-safe rules on that wall regardless of the test results. The customer's first question was whether the listing agent should have known. The tech's answer was that he could not say what the agent knew, that the county record showed both years, and that the customer could raise it with their own agent or attorney if they wanted to.

The near miss

Results came back a week later. The tile was positive for asbestos, and so was the black adhesive. So was the siding.

Under the first quote, a crew would have opened that wall with a reciprocating saw. A saw blade through asbestos-cement siding produces the fine airborne dust that makes the material dangerous, inside an occupied house, with the HVAC return in the family room. The same crew would have torn out the kitchen vinyl and scraped the old tile and adhesive with a floor scraper. Two dry disturbances of asbestos-containing material, neither one contained, both with the crew unprotected and the customer's family living there. None of that happened, because the tech read the basement before he measured the wall.

The job went ahead. A licensed abatement contractor removed the siding within the opening area and the work area of tile under containment, with clearance. The shop then opened the wall under RRP controls, installed the header, and laid the new kitchen floor over a new underlayment. The finished job took about three times as many calendar days as the first quote and about one and a half times the shop's labor hours, and the customer kept the shop for the whole thing.

What would have caught it before the visit

• The intake question. The office now asks for the year and checks the public record during the booking call, recording both sources and booking to the older year when they disagree. See related: The Older Home Intake Question Set SOP.
• A photo request. One photo of the electrical panel and one of the basement or crawlspace, requested at booking, would have shown a fuse panel beside a subpanel, which is enough to ask the question.
• Assuming additions share walls. Any addition shares at least one wall with the original house, and that wall was an exterior wall first. Whatever siding, paint and sheathing the original house had may still be on it.

References

• EPA, Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule, 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E
• See related: Dating a House by What You Find in It
• See related: Recognize, Record, Route: The Rule for Legacy Materials
• See related: Nine-Inch Floor Tile and Black Mastic
• See related: How to Do a Legacy Materials Walk Before Quoting an Older House