Evanston is the oldest housing stock we regularly inspect outside the city itself — a great deal of it pre-dates 1930, much of it is solid masonry, and a significant share has been carved into condos or rented to Northwestern students and then carved back. That combination produces the two things worth paying for here: an honest read on hundred-year-old building systems, and a clear account of what a renovation actually did behind the finishes.
Book your Evanston home inspection — pick a time online in about two minutes. Weekend inspections available.
We are a licensed Illinois home inspection entity (License 451.001520). Every inspection includes thermal imaging at no additional charge, and your full photo report arrives within one business day.
Century-old systems, and what is left of the originals
The question in an Evanston house is rarely whether it was built well. It usually was. The question is which original systems are still in service and what the intervening decades did to them.
- Knob-and-tube wiring still turns up in unrenovated attics and walls. Insurers frequently will not write a policy over it, which makes it a closing problem and not just a safety one.
- Steam and hot-water boilers, some of them very old and still working. We check the safety controls — low-water cutoff, pressure relief, expansion — because that is where an old boiler becomes dangerous rather than merely inefficient.
- Slate and clay tile roofs, which outlast everything around them but fail at the flashings, and which cost several times an asphalt roof to repair properly.
- Galvanized supply piping, which closes from the inside and shows up as poor flow upstairs long before it leaks.
- Lead water service lines are a live question in housing this old. We flag what is visible at the meter; the water utility is the authority on what runs under the parkway.
Solid masonry behaves differently
Much of Evanston is solid masonry rather than brick veneer over frame, and it does not manage water the same way. A veneer wall drains behind the brick. A solid wall absorbs and releases, which means failed tuckpointing is not cosmetic — it is the wall taking on water it then has to give back somewhere, usually into a plaster interior.
Add freeze-thaw and a hundred winters and you get the pattern we look for: spalling brick faces, deteriorated mortar joints on the weather elevations, efflorescence and staining on the inside of the same walls, and sandblasting damage from a 1970s cleaning that stripped the fired face off the brick and left it drinking water ever since.
Renovations, conversions, and what happened behind the drywall
A large share of Evanston housing has been converted — single-family to two-flat, two-flat to condos, attic to bedroom, basement to rental. Some of that work was permitted and well done. Some of it was not.
We look for the tells: bedrooms below grade without proper egress, bathrooms added over joists someone cut through, a third-floor unit reached by a single stair, HVAC serving a space it was never sized for, and new finishes stopping abruptly where a permit inspector would have looked. Thermal imaging is genuinely useful here — it shows where insulation was skipped behind new drywall and where a wall is wet without opening it.
Condos and two-flats
For a condo in a converted building, the inspection covers your unit. The roof, the masonry envelope, the common risers and the boiler if it is shared belong to the association — and in a hundred-year-old building those are exactly the expensive items. The reserve study is not optional reading here.
If you are buying a two-flat and intend to rent the second unit, the Illinois Radon Awareness Act and the Tenants Radon Protection Act both bear on you as a landlord, not just as an owner. Worth knowing before closing rather than after.
Radon, sewer, and moisture
Radon is common across northern Illinois and Evanston is no exception; below-grade finished space and sump pits are the configurations most worth testing. Sewer laterals here are old — frequently clay tile — and the parkway elms and maples that make these streets what they are have had a century to find the joints. Of everywhere we work, Evanston is among the strongest cases for a sewer scope.
For mold we sample in-house with an outdoor control. Honest limits apply: there is no federal or Illinois numerical “safe” level, Illinois does not license mold assessors, and a clean air sample does not prove a house has none.
Common questions
The house is landmarked or in a historic district. Does that change the inspection?
Not the inspection itself, but it changes your options afterward. Replacement windows, roofing material and exterior alterations can be constrained, which affects both cost and feasibility of the repairs we identify. Worth confirming the property’s status with the city before you budget from our report.
Is knob-and-tube automatically a dealbreaker?
Not automatically, but treat it as an insurance question first and a safety question second. Find out whether your carrier will write the policy before you negotiate the repair.
Can you inspect on a weekend?
Yes. We do not schedule evenings.
What the inspection does not include
A home inspection is a visual, non-invasive evaluation of the systems accessible on the day of the inspection. We do not open walls, move stored belongings, dismantle equipment, or predict how long a component will last. We do not inspect septic systems or test well water, and we do not perform the structural engineering analysis some findings call for. A sewer scope needs an accessible cleanout; standing water or an inaccessible line limits what the camera can show.
We also do not perform repairs, sell remediation, or take referral fees. We measure and interpret; you decide what to do about it. The company scoping your sewer line should not also be the company quoting the repair.
What the inspection covers: every inspection we perform in Evanston follows the same scope. See our home inspection services and what each one covers — pre-purchase, pre-listing, new construction, condo and multi-unit — plus in-house radon, mold, and sewer scope testing.
Nearby areas we inspect: Skokie, Rogers Park, Glenview, Highland Park, Wilmette. If you are looking in more than one area, the same inspector and the same scope apply to all of them.
Schedule a Evanston home inspection
Book your Evanston home inspection online. Tell us the address and whether you want radon, mold, or a sewer scope added, and we will confirm the time and what the inspection will cover.