Just Bought an Older North Texas Home? Check These Ten Things

A home inspection is a snapshot of visible condition on one day. It is genuinely useful and it is not the same as knowing your house. These are the things worth establishing in your first month in an older North Texas home — most of them cost nothing and take minutes.

1. Find and test the main water shutoff

Do this first. Check the meter box near the street and the exterior wall where the supply enters the house. Then actually turn it, with a faucet open so you can confirm the water stops. A valve you have never operated is a valve that may be seized, and finding that out during a burst pipe is the wrong time.

Show everyone in the house. Consider tagging it.

2. Identify your supply pipe material

Look at the water heater connections and under a sink. A magnet sticks to galvanized steel and not to copper. Grey flexible plastic stamped PB2110 is polybutylene. Cream-coloured rigid plastic is CPVC. Flexible tubing in red, blue or white is PEX.

This one fact tells you a great deal about what to expect. Galvanized means declining pressure and eventual repiping. Polybutylene means a material with a known sudden-failure pattern. Copper in hard water means watching for pinhole leaks over time.

3. Measure your water pressure

A gauge that screws onto an exterior hose bib costs very little. High static pressure quietly destroys fixtures, appliances, supply hoses and connections throughout the house, and a great many homeowners have no idea their pressure is out of range. It is the cheapest diagnostic you will ever run.

4. Run the meter test for a hidden leak

Shut off every fixture, appliance, ice maker and irrigation zone. Find the leak indicator on your water meter and watch it. Note the exact reading, leave the house untouched for two hours, and read it again. Any change means water is leaving the system somewhere — and in a slab home that somewhere may be under the concrete.

Doing this early gives you a baseline. It also catches a slab leak a seller genuinely did not know about.

5. Check the age of the water heater

The manufacture date is encoded in the serial number on the data plate, and most manufacturers publish how to read theirs. In North Texas hard water, a tank heater generally gives you somewhere in the eight-to-twelve-year range. If yours is past ten, plan for it rather than waiting for water on the floor.

While you are there: is there a drain pan? Is there an expansion tank? Is the T&P discharge piped properly and not capped? Those are the details unpermitted replacements skip.

6. Consider a sewer camera inspection

Standard home inspections do not include the buried lateral, and it is the one component where failure is expensive and completely invisible. On a home over about twenty years old, particularly with mature trees between the house and the street, it is the highest-value inspection available.

Ideally this happens during the option period. If you have already closed, it is still worth knowing.

7. Test every shutoff valve in the house

Angle stops under sinks, behind toilets, behind the washing machine, and at the water heater. A seized valve means you cannot isolate a fixture, which turns any small repair into a whole-house shutdown. Replacing them is a small job and doing it proactively is far cheaper than doing it during a leak.

8. Look at the washing machine hoses

If they are rubber and you do not know their age, replace them with braided stainless steel. It is one of the cheapest meaningful upgrades in home ownership, and burst supply hoses cause some of the worst water damage we see.

9. Establish the HVAC baseline

Find the manufacture date on the outdoor unit data plate and note the refrigerant type. R-22 means any future refrigerant repair will be expensive, which should change how you think about investing in that system.

Then check whether the manufacturer warranty transfers, and whether it was ever registered. Both have short windows and both are easy to miss during a move.

Book a full tune-up and ask specifically for the numbers: static pressure, temperature split, refrigerant pressures, capacitor values. That gives you a baseline to compare against next year.

What to plan for by decade

Rough guidance based on what we find in this area. Every house differs, but the era tells you where to look.

• Pre-1970: possible galvanized supply, cast iron or clay drain lines, original gas runs with corroded threads. Expect declining pressure and drain problems.
• Late 1970s to mid 1990s: the polybutylene window. Also the era where cast iron drains are now at the end of their run.
• 1990s to 2000s: typically copper supply, which is durable but subject to pinhole corrosion from our hard water over a couple of decades, particularly on hot lines. Original HVAC and water heaters are now well past service life.
• 2000s to 2010s: sound PVC drains and copper or early PEX supply. Watch for backfill settling creating bellies in drain lines, and for builder-grade equipment reaching end of life.

The two constants

Whatever the era, two North Texas factors apply to every house here. Hard water is working on your water heater, your fixtures and any tankless equipment continuously. And expansive clay soil flexes your slab and everything buried in it through every wet and dry cycle, which is why slab leaks and shifted drain joints are regional specialities rather than bad luck.

Knowing that up front turns surprises into maintenance. If you want a proper walkthrough of a house you have just bought, call (469) 338-5533 — it is a genuinely useful visit and it is cheaper than the first thing you would otherwise discover the hard way.