Field Note: the hot attic, the cold basement, and an old farmhouse
A pre-purchase home performance study in the Livermore valley.
"The attic is hot, the basement is cold, and the various heating and cooling systems make it appear as though the previous owner was trying to solve a problem that I'm not sure ever got solved."
That is from a buyer who wrote through our website form this July. He was in escrow on a 1920 farmhouse in the Livermore valley. Around 2,800 square feet, a finished attic, a basement, a recently replaced furnace, and wall-mounted split units added around the rest of the house over the years.
He was not looking for a reason to walk away from the purchase. He planned to own the house for decades and was already expecting fairly extensive upgrades. What he wanted, before any of that money moved, was an analysis of the house from a building science perspective: where high-performance measures would provide meaningful value, and where they would not. His goals, in his words: comfort, durability, and long-term performance, while staying practical about cost and preserving the character of the farmhouse.
That is what a performance study is for.
My guess from his first note (before I saw the house) was that the equipment was probably not the problem. When a house with a central furnace ends up with split units added room by room, the problem is usually the envelope: insulation, air tightness, and how conditioned air moves through the house. But that was a guess. The two hours on site were for checking it.
The visit was a morning in late July, sunny but not hot yet. The finished attic was already warming up when I went through it, and a few of its spaces felt distinctly warmer than the rest. Those happened to be the ones with through-wall air conditioners cut into them. Two hours on site, a checklist written for this house, and a 3D scan of the whole building. I also digested the home inspection and roof report alongside my own notes; the study is a different document, and the two work together. An inspection lists what is broken today. My report shows how the house works as one system, and what it takes, in what order, to make it comfortable and durable.
All of it fit inside his escrow window. The purchase moved on its own schedule, and nobody had to slow anything down for us.
The result was a fixed-price report in five parts, issued over five days: overview and order of work, stopping water at the outside, the envelope (roof, walls, windows), floor and crawl space, and mechanical and electrical. Each envelope section ends with a numbered build sequence, layer by layer: plain language for the owner in one column, dimensions and the 2025 California code section for the bidder in the next. The bulk water management part is split in two on purpose; half of it is maintenance a gardener can do at low cost, with no permit and no drawings. In addition, it comes with an answer about the dry rot, moisture and mitigation. These are good to know before closing, while the finding can still inform the deal, and the repair can be sequenced with everything else he is planning.
A week after the last part of the report went out, he asked whether the scan could tell him the approximate volume of the house. It could: about 45,000 cubic feet gross, finished grade to the outside face of the roof, attic included, with the roof pitch measured off the point cloud at 9:12. Those numbers could inform when the heating and cooling design work starts.
The listing then closed following the delivery of the full report. He went in knowing what he bought and what to fix first, and the upgrades he was planning now have a sequence and a reason for it.
If you are buying an older house, or already own one that never quite got comfortable, this is the study to start with. It begins with a site visit; details are here: how we work. Or write to us through the contact form; a couple of paragraphs about your house is enough.
Comments