Stage two inside
Inside: the rooms in the order they are walked
A house is walked the way it was built to be used, not the way a floor plan is drawn. Front door, hall, reception room, kitchen, the rooms behind the kitchen, then up. The order matters, because each room sets the question asked in the next one.
This is a description of how this company looks at a building. It is not a survey method and it is not advice.
01
Hall and stairs
The hall is where floor levels, light and smell are settled in under two minutes. The height of the internal floor against the path outside decides how much of the brickwork below the damp-proof course is doing work it was never meant to do. A tide line across the bottom of the plaster is read alongside the outside ground level before anybody says the word damp out loud.
The staircase gets weight put on it, tread by tread, with a hand on the handrail and a look underneath where the cupboard door opens. A soft tread is joinery. A string that moves, or a newel post that is no longer holding anything, is a different order of problem and belongs to somebody with a qualification.
02
The reception room
In the front room the questions are light, floor and openings. Which way the window faces and what it looks at; whether the floor bounces in the middle of the span or only by the hearth; whether a chimney breast has been taken out and, if so, what is now carrying the one above it. A knocked-through opening between two rooms is normal in these streets and perfectly fine when it was done properly, which means something spanning the gap and bearings at each end that were designed rather than guessed.
Then the small evidence: a cornice that stops mid-wall, a skirting that changes profile halfway along, a radiator in a place no radiator would ever be put from scratch. Each one marks where somebody altered the room, and alterations are where the surprises live.
03
The kitchen and the rooms behind it
Kitchens hide more water than the rest of the house put together, so this is the slowest room. Under the sink with a torch, behind the washing machine, along the back of the base units at floor level, and around any wall that used to be outside before a back addition was built. The junction between an older house and a newer extension is the single most informative metre of wall in the building.
Taps are run hot and cold together to hear what the boiler does under load. Waste traps that have dried out are noted as smells, not as leaks. If there is a utility room or a downstairs shower, the same torch goes round it twice, because those rooms are often the newest and the least carefully done.
04
Landing, bedrooms and the bathroom
Upstairs the house gives away what the roof has been doing. Ceilings get looked at in raking light from the landing window; a brown edge in a corner is usually flashing or a valley rather than the whole roof. Bedroom doors are opened and left open to see whether they swing, because a door that will not stay where it is put says something about floor levels that no amount of new carpet hides.
In the bathroom, the floor around the pan and the bath feet take weight, sealant lines get pressed, and the ceiling below gets checked from the other side afterwards. The bathroom is measured last and is almost always the smallest number of the walk.
05
The loft hatch, head and shoulders only
The hatch comes down and a torch goes up, head and shoulders through the opening and no further. From there: daylight where there should not be daylight, felt that has gone to ribbons, insulation depth, whether a water tank is still up there and whether anything has been standing on the ceiling joists that was never meant to. Nobody walks about in a loft on a first acquaintance with a house.
06
What a walk cannot see, said plainly
A walk sees surfaces and symptoms. It does not see inside a wall, under a floor, along a drain or into a foundation, and it cannot date a crack. Where any of those matter, the right answer is a surveyor, a structural engineer or a drainage camera, and their report is the one that decides, not a torch and a tape.
The measuring tool on the walk-through page belongs to this stage, and the walk continues out of the back door. Questions about a particular house go to viewings@garibproperty.space.