Four checks worth building into your routine, and the mindset behind all of them.
By Nookhaven Homes | August 25, 2026
Most of us only think about a home inspection twice: once when buying, once when selling and a buyer’s inspector shows up with their own checklist. Everything in between typically goes unexamined, simply because life is happening and we’re not thinking about it. A few checks along the way, done on your own schedule, catch small issues before they become big ones. It might also mean you’re never finding something out at the same moment a buyer is.
How to Look at Your Own House Like an Inspector
Most of us walk through a home the way a buyer does: noticing the counters, the floors, the light, how a room feels to stand in. An inspector notices almost none of that. They’re watching where water goes when it rains, checking for stains below windows that shouldn’t be there, tracing where the plumbing actually runs behind the walls, and opening the electrical panel to look for anything wired the wrong way. It’s a completely different way of seeing the same home.
You don’t need a flashlight and a clipboard to borrow that mindset. It just means building a routine around the same kind of questions an inspector would ask. It means checking in on the parts of the house that are easily forgotten, on a schedule, rather than only when something forces the issue. The checks below are what that routine can look like in practice.
Your Sewer Line
Easy to forget, since it’s the one part of the house you never see. A sewer scope is worth doing every 2 to 3 years for most homes, closer to every year if you’ve got older clay or cast-iron pipe or mature trees near the line, since roots are the leading cause of slow, expensive damage. Newer plastic piping can often stretch that to every 5 to 10 years.
Water, Before It Becomes a Problem
One of the best checks costs nothing and gives you something to do on a rainy afternoon: walk your property during a hard rain and watch where the water is going. You are looking for overflowing gutters, downspouts draining straight into the foundation, water pooling against the house. These are the things an inspector would flag, and things that may have been missed in your home inspection, unless it happened to be raining that day.
Your Roof, After a Storm
Most Colorado insurance policies give you somewhere between 6 and 12 months to file a hail damage claim, and roof damage is often invisible from the ground. If your neighborhood has had a serious hailstorm, get it looked at within the season. Most roofing companies offer a free assessment.
Radon
Colorado sits mostly in the EPA’s highest radon-risk zone. If your home doesn’t have a mitigation system, the general guidance is to retest every 5 years if your last result was under 2 pCi/L, and every 2 years if it landed between 2 and 3.9. At 4 pCi/L or above, mitigation is recommended.
Keep a routine like this going for a few years, and you’ve essentially been giving your home its own pre-listing inspection all along. Instead of done all at once before you sell, it’s spread out over time helping to keep costs manageable. And it’s worth something beyond staying ahead of expensive surprises: when a buyer’s own inspector starts asking questions about the sewer line, the roof, or what the radon levels look like, you’ll already know the answers. That’s real confidence for a buyer (the kind that can mean them moving faster, negotiating less, and offering more) and it’s a genuine kind of peace of mind for you.
Inspired by writing in Good Housekeeping. All writing is original, re-voiced, and locally grounded for the Nookhaven community.
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