The City of St. Louis Park Gives The All-Clear!

The city of St. Louis Park, Minnesota which is a "first ring" suburb of Minneapolis requires all homes up for sale to pass a city inspection. It's just a hand-full of cities in Minnesota that actually require an pre-sale inspection.

During these tough times when cities are strapped for cash I can see more of them moving in this direction. Although to be fair to St. Louis Park they've been doing this for years. Before the economy tanked.

Basically, in order to close on a sale of your house you need an official "Property Maintenance" certificate issued. Without it, you can't close ergo you can't sell your house.

So you have to cough up $210 to have a city housing inspector come to your house and check to make sure everything is kosher.

The city came up 15 things I needed to fix! It came as quite a shocker since we've been living here for 7 years without any issues.

Some of the stuff I could see, the other was way too nit-picky but we had to comply if we want to sell our house. We're not too keen on having a mortgage in Minnesota AND California.

For a "handyman-challenged" individual like me, the list wast a bit scary. Things like "support the gas line for the dryer" and a few electrical fixes had me wondering how much this was going to cost me!

Luckily my father in law is a retired electrical engineer and the most incredible handyman I've ever met. He can fix anything and his nickname around his neighborhood was "McGyver". :-)

It took 3 days but we were able to cross everything from the list. The only thing I had to hire out was for a mason to replace some missing mortor form the outside chimney. That cost $100 which I found pretty cheap for two masons to setup their cement machine and patch up the brick on the chimney.

I also had a very old (40+ year old) fence and 7 years worth of brush that I had to remove from the backyard. I removed the fence myself and cleared out the brush. That took a few more days but I got it all cleaned up.

I took the debris from the fence to the Hennepin county recycle center and for $19 I was able to dump all that stuff there.

I was finally ready for the re-inspection. I actually had a nightmare the nigh before where the inspector kept adding more stuff and yelling at me for having a "bad house". Yea, what can I say the inspection has been on my mind a lot since September since without the certificate we can't sell our house.

Finally today was the day. The inspector came by for the re-inspection and we passed with flying colors! He was very nice and checked everything off the list and at last he gave me the certificate...

Now we just need to find a damn buyer for the house! :-)