Dave,
Carpentersville was big on the fix all or nothing idea. I would say a lot of homes there were built below the standards of the 50's and 60's. Add 40-50 years of HO upgrades and repairs to that. Being it's a lower priced area the HO don't have much money for needed repairs or doing thing right. If someone needs work done like a service replacement the following will happen:
1. A sucker EC not familuar with the town will quote the the service. Pull the permit do the work and fail inspection. They will end up rewiering and updateing the whole house for free. I seen this happen to a few. Good for homeowner.
2. A EC not familuar with the town quotes and does the work with the permit. Fails inspection because of upgrades not done and refuses to do more work for free.
3. An EC tries to cover all the bases installs smokes all over, new grounds, GFI's, lights in attic & crawel, relocates service. The service is 100x better then the unsafe set up before. Still fails because they missed some cloth ungrounded wires that must be replaced with pipe. That one happened to us. We had a diclaimer on quote about unforseen code violations. HO had no more $ and or did not want to pay more. Last I knew he still had his meter bypased and a temp drop from old location because utility could not do anything with out inspection aproval.
4. The EC goes to the home and waist time quoting the job and fixing everything and the HO ends up going with #5.
5. The HO finds someone to do it cheep with out a permit or upgrades. I am guesing it would not be done so well.
6. They call me. I give them some crazy number and reasons. Customer hangs up and I go back to work.
Lets face it. If every violation is repaired and everything is up to todays standards in all of marengo or C'vill it would keep a lot of guys busy. Oh, but no one has any money in those towns.
A twist on this is some places the village inspects your home before it's sold.
Tom
