By Sandra Miller
Daily Evening Item
Sometimes a woman’s place is in the home. Lugging a ladder and toting an inspector’s list, that is.
House inspector Bridget McGuiness runs Corrosion Check Inc. out of her Lynn home, and has been in the environmental and inspection business since 1982. One of only 10 women inspectors in the state, her line of work takes her into places both men and women dare not to tread: musty crawlspaces, spooky attics, and damp basements.
In one house, she noticed a basement crawlspace that dropped from 4’ in height to about 2’ in height, and inside it was dark, damp, and full of spider webs. She had a hunch that it was worth checking out, and after some messy crawling around, she discovered that in one the area of the foundation, several feet of sill was significantly rotted from years of water pooling on the outside of the house. “A contractor estimated the damage would cost about $20,000 to repair. I believe the seller agreed to pay for the repair. My buyer was happy.” Even better, she gained another surprise customer: the seller. “His inspector hadn’t caught the damage when he did the inspection. The seller then hired me to inspect the house he was buying.”
She finds that many won’t hire her because she’s a woman, but other times they will hire her because of her gender. “Some people feel that a woman will be more thorough or easier to talk to. I’m pretty thorough in the work I do, and I probably am more thorough, from what my clients have told me, than some of the inspectors they see. This often translates into longer inspection times than they’re used to.”
That often translates into being more popular among buyer agents, whose job is to find a thorough inspector, not an easy one. “Realtors say ‘I’ve worked so long in this business, and I’ve never seen a woman inspector.’”
She has worked in male-dominated industries for almost all of her work life. She received a degree in civil engineering from Worcester Polytech Institute where the ratio was 8 men to every woman. Her first job was for the U.S. EPA as the Region 1 NESHAP asbestos standard coordinator. “The contractors were all men, and older than me – and a lot of them didn’t like compliance specialists anyway, so being a woman engineer was tough. Our job was to crack down on a lot of the contractors who were pretty sleazy. So I got some attitude from the contractors.”
She became her own boss, first doing asbestos management consulting, and then thousands of hours of training later, doing environmental consulting, training and home inspections.
“I am mostly used to the flak I get as a woman doing engineering/inspection work. I sometimes feel that people feel more entitled to challenge my knowledge or skills because I am a woman.” But she finds she can hold her own among all the testosterone. “I have a strong personality, so I don’t come off as someone who can be pushed to the side.”
Many of her clients are women who are first-time homebuyers, and appreciate hiring someone who will take the time to explain how something functions, and what to expect in coming years. She provides free estimates, and also does lead, radon, and asbestos testing. She’s a big advocate of clients educating themselves about what makes their house – or potential house -- warm, their water hot, their pipes flowing, their switches on, their house sturdy. “That way, as you attend open houses, you may be able to bypass houses that require more work than what you can afford, given the cost of the house and immediate or near future repair or replacement expenses,” says McGuiness. She also offers classes to homeowners wanting to learn how to create a safer home.
She has many happy customers, and so much of her customer base comes from word of mouth. “I’m happy to do whatever it takes for the client,” she says. In return, she says, “I’m not doing the same thing every day. Overall, I really love my job.”
McGuiness was born to the job, growing up in an old Victorian in Worcester with two parents who were exacting, thorough and precise, great qualities for a home inspector to inherit. An athlete in high school who was also good in science and math, she paid attention when her mother warned, “If you don’t get a career, you’ll have to go to nursing school.” Recalls McGuiness, “I said, ‘Oh no!’”
She adds, “Both of my parents instilled in us that we could do whatever we wanted to, that we were smart and if we worked really hard we’d do ok.” Her father went to engineering school at night and did corrosion prevention work on utilities’ pipes. She was pretty handy around the house as a kid, helping with interior painting, tinkering with cars, and following her father to the hardware store. She also followed her brother into WPI, as did her sister. Her brother became a doctor, and her sister a nuclear engineer.
Inheriting the name of her father’s business, Corrosion Check, today she is a nationally recognized expert in asbestos field, often being called for expert witness work in cases for the Department of Justice, and for U.S. attorneys in New York and Connecticut.
McGuiness, 42, lives near the ocean in Lynn with her partner, Margot Ables, in a 90-year-old 9-room Victorian-style home that benefits from having a handy owner. She updated the boiler, painted the interior, refinished the wood floors, built a new patio and did some landscaping, although she’ll hire professionals for the roof and electrical system. “I’m more the hammer wielder,” says McGuiness. “Margot’s more of the interior design person, and she handles the finances.” McGuiness’ mom keeps the business’ books.
Ironically, she didn’t inspect her own home when she bought it; she felt that “If anything was significantly I didn’t want the buyer to think I was making it up just to knock the price down.” She hired her mentor, home inspector Ernie Simpson, and Bob Caldwell, her teacher at Northeastern University’s inspector certification program, for field inspection.
“I kept my distance during my home inspection, but Ernie basically did the inspection the way I do them, outside and inside. He took me aside to explain a few things that went beyond what he’d tell someone else buying a house. The big issues were electrical service panel overfusing, and the roof was pretty obvious.”
Simpson and Caldwell were like mentors to her, and she thinks about mentoring someone herself, especially women. “At my last count, the state had issued 532 home inspector licenses,” she says. “Women hold about 10 of those licenses. That in my opinion is a remarkably poor statistic. This is a very white, very male-dominated field.”
However, she finds she’s too busy to do much about this now; plus, taking on an apprentice makes her vulnerable to tricky laws. “You carry their liability forever. They can say ‘You never taught me that.’ That’s what’s unfortunate with this industry.”
Perhaps it’s the crawling around musty basements that turn off a lot of women to the trade, or perhaps it’s the often strenuous turns the job takes. McGuiness is active at the gym and on her bike, which “helps when I have to heave the ladders and go into crawl spaces.”
She adds, “The toughest part of my job is the paperwork.”
