Picking up where we left off last week...
One aspect of an inspection is the background information. This information is usually collected by talking to other parties such as the homeowner, installer or builder. Is this information fact, fiction or opinion? How much of it can be used in reaching a conclusion and cause? If you ever end up in court, you will hear that much of that kind of information is hearsay, and not information you can present. It's also not something on which you should base a conclusion.
For instance, the builder tells you that he put a vapor barrier under the slab. Now the slab is wet. Can you use the builder's statement to rule out below-grade moisture? You shouldn't, because at this point it may not be fact. Worse even is that the homeowner told you that the builder told her that he put a vapor barrier under the slab. The only way to determine if, in fact, there is a vapor barrier under the slab is to find it out for yourself. Construction photos might work, but cutting a hole and eyeballing the vapor barrier is better.
So basically, everything in the background information is opinion unless you have proof that it is fact or not. In many cases, people don't tell the truth, so some of your background information is fiction. A homeowner once told me that the floors were never wet-mopped. The floor looked like it had been wet-mopped. So I started looking for other possible causes, until the cleaning lady came in and started wet-mopping the floor in front of me.
Sometimes background information can be used, if there is documentation to back it up. Delivery tickets and invoices can support acclimation and installation times. If the homeowner said the floors were left in the house to acclimate for five days, and the manufacturer's instructions call for 10 days of acclimation, can we say the floors were not properly acclimated? Based on her statement, we had better not say, "The floors were not properly acclimated." But we could say, "Based on Mrs. Homeowner's comments, the floors were not acclimated to manufacturer's instructions."
Speaking of which, is acclimation even an issue with the floor you're inspecting? Or, is it irrelevant (in which case we shouldn't even mention it)? If acclimation is an issue with the floor, does the background information tell us anything? No, the floor tells us whether it was properly acclimated or not.
I rarely use background information in forming a conclusion and cause. When I do use it, I do everything I can to verify that information first. People don't always tell the truth, but floors don't lie. Let the floor tell you what is happening.
