Product Description

This is a concise and comprehensive guide to building defects and building inspection. Whether, as a practitioner, you are employed in buying, selling, managing or maintaining houses or whether, as a layperson, you are buying a property to invest in or live in, this book should help you make sound decisions and, possibly, avoid costly mistakes.

House Inspector is a general and accessible book which describes how and why house construction has changed, identifies some of the more common defects, and provides a series of elemental check lists.

So, if you are a trainee or general practice surveyor, a maintenance inspector, a housing manager, an estate agent, a planner, or even if you are a private purchaser or investor, this book should improve your knowledge and understanding of potential problems and provide a simple framework for a competent building inspection.

*Most chapters include a brief history of the building over the last hundred years to help understand and identify specific construction details, illustrations and explanations of the most common building defects, a simple checklist to help carry out a systematic and thorough inspection.
*Photographs and diagrams all in colour
*Chapters on all the major construction elements - floors, walls, roofs, heating, drainage etc. as well as on dampness and condensation

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #219779 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Has been involved with building all of working life. Spent several years on site, working on new and old buildings, before becoming a building surveyors and, eventually a teacher

Customer Reviews

Small format lets it down
This is a great source for any building industry student. Full of useful photographs, sketches, diagrams etc. Unfortunately, because of its small standard paperback format most of the graphical images are thumbnail size which makes them difficult to study. Otherwise 10 out of 10.

Good Book, Poor binding
This book has been by written by Duncan Marshall (main author I think) who also seems to have been the main author in The Construction of Houses and Understanding Housing Defects. I read this book after I had read the Construction of Houses and I found it good. In writing this book I think the author has attempted to make his explanations as concise and clear as possible. Maybe too concise as to really understand the concept I sometimes had to refer to the Construction of Houses. This is a pocket book, albeit a detailed one, and sometimes you got the feeling that the size of the book was on the author's mind.

Nonetheless some of the conciser explanations are clearer and better expressed than in the Construction of Houses. One of the reasons for this is because of the excellent presentation of photographs and diagrams. Even when a lot of photos and diagrams are on one page they are well laid out, well explained and do not clutter each other. All the photos and diagrams are in colour which really helps understanding. Especially compared to The Construction of Houses where they are all in black and white. When presenting the checklists the author does his best to make them as clear as possible and keeps as much relevant information together and within eyeshot. Also the sequence of the chapters is right for logical learning.

I think the Construction of Houses would probably be a better starting book for the novice in that it gives fuller explanations, something this book is not always able to do because of lack of space. However the House Inspector has better photos and diagrams and sometimes better expressed explanations. I would have given this book 4 stars plus only for the fact that having read the book from cover to cover once it has fallen apart. If you fully open the book in the middle it will break the binding. Otherwise a well thought out, well explained, well presented book.