Home Inspector in Grosse Pointe Park, MI

Grosse Pointe Park has the oldest housing of the five Pointes: 62 percent of its homes were built before 1940, and the median year built is 1938. It is also the Pointe closest to Detroit, running from Alter Road and Mack to Windmill Pointe, where Lake St. Clair becomes the Detroit River. That range gives me limestone and slate mansions on one end and tightly packed brick homes and two-flats on the other.

Windmill Pointe was platted in 1916 and built out in the 1920s in English Manor, French Renaissance, Tudor, Georgian, and Colonial styles, with limestone and brick walls, slate roofs, and copper gutters. Those materials outlast the flashings, fasteners, and mortar holding them together, and a century of mechanical work sits underneath. On the west end, the two-flats and close-set brick houses of the Cabbage Patch raise different questions about shared systems, rental use, and what each unit actually has.

The Park was the worst-hit community in the region in June 2021, with roughly 2,000 homes backed up in one night and around 3,000 basements across that summer’s two events, on a combined sewer system that had already failed five times since 2011. Backwater valves, sump pits, and the evidence of prior sewage flooding are the first things I look for in a Park basement.

1910s–1920s Windmill Pointe and lakeshore estates

The 1916 plat filled in through the 1920s with the largest houses in the city: limestone and brick, slate roofs, copper gutters and flashings, leaded glass, and plaster over lath on every wall. Homes from this era commonly have steam or hot-water boilers with cast-iron radiators, multiple unlined chimney flues, stone or brick foundations, galvanized supply, clay laterals, asbestos on boiler piping, and knob-and-tube remnants behind newer circuits. I fly the roof and document every valley and flashing, run the boiler through a full cycle, photograph each foundation wall inside and out, and put the thermal camera on plaster ceilings under bathrooms and valleys where slow leaks hide.

1920s–1930s brick homes and two-flats from Alter to Cadieux

The same decades built the tightly packed brick houses and two-flats on the west end and the blocks around Bishop, Kensington, and Yorkshire. Homes from this era commonly have balloon framing, plaster and lath, 60-amp or fuse-panel service that has been upgraded once, galvanized supply at the end of its life, cast-iron and clay drains, and finished third floors added on wiring that was never meant to carry them. In a two-flat I establish what each unit has: its own furnace or a shared one, one water heater or two, separate meters or not, and which panel feeds which kitchen. A multi-unit inspection covers two to four units and documents every one.

1940s–1950s brick colonials and ranches (about 25%)

The postwar houses filled the remaining lots, usually smaller than the pre-war homes around them. Homes from this era commonly have early breaker panels or 60-amp fuse boxes, galvanized plumbing at seventy years, block foundations, ductwork sized for a furnace three replacements ago, and asbestos in floor tile or duct wrap. I open the panel and look for double taps and scorched conductors, run several fixtures at once to find the pressure drop galvanized pipe produces, check each register with the thermal camera, and look at the roof deck from the attic for leaks that predate the current shingles.

1960s to today: the small remainder and the infill (about 13%)

Only about 4 percent of the Park dates from the 1960s, but those houses sit inside the 1965 to 1973 aluminum branch-circuit wiring window, and I identify aluminum at the panel and receptacles and document it by circuit. Anything built 1978 to 1995 gets checked for gray polybutylene supply. New construction here is infill on scattered lots and gut renovations, and homes from this era commonly have complex roofs, multiple HVAC zones, and high-efficiency furnace venting mistakes. A new house on an old lot still sits on the original water service and lateral unless the permit record says otherwise.

Radon is not the Park’s headline risk, but it is not zero either. Wayne County is EPA Zone 3, the lowest category, while EGLE’s test-result map shows 17 percent of county tests at or above the 4.0 pCi/L action level. That is a county figure, not a prediction for one house, and stone and brick foundations from the 1920s have more openings to the soil than a poured wall. A 48-hour continuous-monitor test in the lowest livable level costs $175 and runs inside your inspection window.