Should I care if the listing info said they were bedrooms?

Nope–what the listing info says is of little interest to me except as it might pertain to my buyer being misinformed or even mislead.

Now, while I will let lots of what constitutes a bedroom by current standards slide in older homes, emergency escape and rescue is not one of them. There is a long list of things that are currently required to make a room a sleeping area. The biggest portion of this list is made up of things required of ANY habitable space. Some of the things on that list, the average home buyer might not even associate with a bedroom. Things like square footage, ceiling height, lighting, ventilation, source of heat, smoke detectors, AFCI protection, and a means of secondary escape and rescue.

Noticeably absent from this list is a closet–although the appraiser might have more to say about that than I would.

The following picture shows someone’s attempt at creating “secondary escape and rescue” from a room in a basement “listed” as a bedroom. Nice. However, the window opening is too small, and too far off the floor to meet the requirements of the time it was installed.

The window has a much bigger problem though.

Can you tell what the problem is?

The problem is that there is no “outdoors” outside the window. This window opens into the hallway that leads to the “bedroom.” Another room in the basement had a similar window that did open to the outdoors–except it was not as tall as this one.  So now the house just went from being a house described in the listing as being a “6 Bedroom” house, to a house described in the inspection report as a “4 Bedroom” house–even though both rooms had closets.

Like I said, I don’t care if the listing info said they were bedrooms!

Actually I DO care very much.

By Charles Buell, Real Estate Inspections in Seattle

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