The option period on a house around here is short, and most buyers spend all of it on the general home inspection. That report is worth having. What it is not is a plumbing report. A home inspector runs the faucets, flushes the toilets, opens the cabinet doors under the sinks, and writes down what he can see from standing height. Everything underneath a slab, inside a wall, or on the far side of the foundation is outside his job.
We get called into a lot of houses in Longview and Tyler after the fact, when somebody has already closed and the shower at the back of the house is running at a trickle. The easier version is getting called during the option period instead. What follows is roughly how we walk a house, sorted by when it was built, because in East Texas the build year tells you most of what you are going to find.
Start by pinning down the age, then get under it
Ask the listing agent what year the house went up and then go look at the foundation yourself, because the two things together decide the whole shape of the inspection. A house sitting up off the ground on piers with a crawl space is a house where the plumbing is visible and reachable. A house sitting flat on a concrete slab is a house where the plumbing is buried and every question about it costs more to answer.
Around Longview, Tyler, Henderson, and Marshall you will find both, sometimes on the same block, because the changeover happened gradually and different builders moved at different speeds. Do not assume from the street. A brick skirt around the bottom of a house hides a crawl space just fine, and plenty of houses out here got a room added on a slab off the back of a pier and beam original, which means two different plumbing situations under one roof.
Pre-war frame houses on piers, where you can actually see everything
The oldest stock in these towns is frame on pier and beam with an open crawl space, and honestly it is the easiest house in the world to look at. Somebody with a light and a willingness to get dirty can see nearly the entire system in twenty minutes. That access is the single best thing about buying one.
What you are looking for down there is the story of everybody who worked on the house before you. Original supply lines will be threaded steel. Somewhere along the way somebody ran copper to the kitchen. Somebody else ran PEX to a bathroom in 2005. You will see all three in the same crawl space, and the junctions between them are where the trouble lives, because a lot of that work was done by whoever was cheapest that week.
Look at how the pipe is supported. A properly run line is strapped to the joists at regular intervals so it does not sag. What we find under a lot of these houses is pipe resting on a stack of bricks, or hanging off a piece of wire, or just laying in the dirt. A drain line that has sagged between supports has a low spot in it, and a low spot collects everything that goes down it. That is a lifetime of stoppages designed into the house.
Also check whether the crawl space is dry. Standing water under a house is either a leak, a drainage problem, or both, and around here the red clay does not drain, so water that gets under a house sits. That moisture is what rusts out steel pipe from the outside, rots the underside of the subfloor, and makes the whole space miserable to work in later.
The 1950s and 60s, when the pipe stopped being visible
Houses from this stretch are where the interesting problems start, because builders were still using metal for everything and starting to bury more of it. The supply lines are galvanized steel, and galvanized has a working life that ended some time ago on a house this old. The zinc lining wears through, the steel underneath starts corroding, and the corrosion builds inward in layers until the opening in a three quarter inch line is down to something you could barely fit a pencil in.
You can test this yourself without any tools during a showing. Go to the bathroom farthest from the water heater, turn the hot on full, and then have somebody start the kitchen sink and flush a toilet. If your shower drops to nothing, the lines are not moving enough volume. Then look at the water itself. Turn on a fixture that has been sitting overnight and watch the first ten seconds. Rusty or tea-colored water that clears up after a minute means scale is shedding off the inside of the pipe wall.
The drains in this era are cast iron, and cast iron does not fail where you can see it. It corrodes along the bottom of the pipe where waste sits, so the top can look perfectly solid while the channel underneath has thinned out or opened up. Tapping on exposed cast iron tells you a little. A camera tells you the truth, which is the next section.
The 70s and 80s, slabs and the polybutylene question
By the seventies most new construction around Longview and Tyler had moved to slab on grade, and that changes your risk profile entirely. Supply lines got run in or under the concrete, drains went under the slab permanently, and a leak that would have been a two hour repair in a crawl space becomes a jackhammer job or a reroute through the attic.
So on a slab house you go looking for evidence that it has already happened. Walk the floors in socks and feel for a warm spot, which is a hot line weeping underneath. Look at the utility room and the garage floor for a saw cut square of newer concrete. Look for one patch of flooring that does not match the rest, or fresh drywall low on a single wall with nothing else in the room repainted. Then ask the seller straight out and ask for the invoice. A repaired slab leak is not a dealbreaker on its own. What you want to know is whether they fixed the one spot or rerouted the line, because in old copper the first slab leak is frequently not the last.
This era also brings polybutylene, the gray plastic supply pipe that went into a lot of houses between the late seventies and the mid nineties. It is gray or sometimes cream colored, flexible, usually marked PB2110, and you will spot it at the water heater connections or coming through the wall at a shutoff valve. It fails at the fittings and it fails without warning. If you find it, that is a real number that belongs in your negotiation before you sign anything, and it is worth having somebody who knows what they are looking at confirm it rather than guessing off a photo.
The 90s and newer, where the problems are workmanship instead of age
A house from the last thirty years is probably copper or PEX on the supply side and PVC on the drains, and none of that is at the end of its life. The questions change. Now you are asking who did the work and whether anybody has messed with it since.
Look for the additions and remodels. A bathroom added to a house in 2011 by a homeowner and a buddy is where you find a drain with no real vent, tied in with a mechanical vent screwed on under the sink or nothing at all. The tell is smell and sound. If a trap gurgles when another fixture drains, or a floor drain pushes odor into a room, that drain is siphoning its own seal because it cannot pull air the right way.
Check the water heater no matter how new the house is. Read the serial number on the label for the manufacture date. A brand new heater in a house where nothing else has been touched is worth a question, because sometimes that is a seller doing right by you and sometimes it means the old one flooded the garage two months before listing. Look at the install: venting done right, a pan with an actual drain, gas line with a drip leg, no kinked flex connectors, an expansion tank where the setup calls for one. Rushed work is visible.
Also exercise the shutoff valves. Every angle stop under every sink and toilet, plus the main. A valve that has sat in one position for twenty years often has a packing washer fused solid, and you find that out at the worst possible moment, standing in water with a handle spinning free in your hand. Replacing stops is small, cheap work and it is the best money in the house.
The sewer camera, which is the one thing nobody else is doing
Here is the part we will be blunt about. Your general home inspector is not scoping the sewer line, and on a house older than about 1990 that line is the largest single unknown in the transaction. It runs from under the house out to the city main or out to a septic tank, it is buried the whole way, and in most cases nobody has ever looked inside it.
A camera on a push rod goes in through the cleanout and travels the run, showing you the actual interior on a screen. What we find in older East Texas lines is usually one of four things: roots at the joints in clay tile, cast iron that has thinned from the inside, a belly where the ground shifted and the line dropped, or a crack. The bellies are the ones people brush off. Our red clay swells when it rains and shrinks when it dries, and it does that hard here, year after year. A line laid in that soil in 1962 has been getting worked on by the ground ever since. A low spot in a sewer line collects solids and gives you a stoppage every few months forever until somebody digs it up.
A scope produces a location and a condition, which is what turns a scary unknown into a line item. Fifteen feet of bad pipe under the front yard is a number. A whole run at the end of its life is a different number. Either way you are negotiating off footage instead of a feeling. Our plumbing inspections include the scope, and if the camera finds something, our sewer line repair page explains what the fix actually involves so you can price it while the option period is still open.
Rural properties, wells, septic, and the transition to city service
Out around Henderson and Marshall, and on anything with acreage, the systems on both ends of the house change and so do the questions.
On a well, find out the depth, the age of the pump, and the last time anybody pulled it. Run water hard for fifteen or twenty minutes and watch whether the pressure holds or the tank starts short cycling, which is the pressure tank telling you the bladder is done. Check what treatment equipment is on the line, because East Texas well water is often hard and sometimes carries iron, and softeners and filter tanks are consumable equipment that somebody has to maintain. Look at the pressure tank and the wiring in the well house while you are out there. A lot of them have been added to over the decades by whoever was handy.
On septic, the tank location, the last pump-out, and the condition of the drain field are the whole conversation. Walk the field. Grass growing greener and taller in one strip, or soft ground, or any smell at all, means effluent is surfacing and that field is failing. A failing drain field is one of the most expensive things that can be wrong with a rural property and it is entirely invisible from the driveway.
The transition properties are their own case. Plenty of places on the edge of Henderson and Marshall got city water run to them at some point while the septic system stayed, or got tied to city sewer while the well stayed for irrigation. When that happens you end up with two systems and a splice point somewhere, sometimes with an abandoned line still connected and sometimes without a backflow preventer where the code wants one. Find out what is actually connected to what before you buy it, because after closing it is your system either way.
Questions we get about pre-purchase plumbing inspections
Q. Does the general home inspection cover any of this? Some of it, at the surface. A good home inspector will run every fixture, note visible corrosion, and flag anything obvious. He is not scoping the sewer, not evaluating a well pump, and not opening a wall. Those are separate specialties and no home inspector claims otherwise. Getting both is normal and the two reports do not overlap much.
Q. Can you get out during our option period? Usually yes, and we schedule around that deadline on purpose because a report that lands after your contingency expires does you no good. Tell us the date when you call and we will work backward from it.
Q. What if the camera finds something bad? Do we lose the house? Almost never, in our experience. Most of what turns up on an older Longview or Tyler house is known, fixable, and priceable, and sellers deal with it either by moving the number or by repairing before closing. Buying blind is the outcome you are trying to avoid, not buying a house with a repair on it.
Q. How long does the inspection take? On a typical house, a couple of hours for the walkthrough and the camera work. A larger place, or a property with a well and septic, takes longer because there is more system to look at. You get a written report with the camera footage either way.
Q. Is it worth doing on a newer house? On anything after about 1995 the sewer scope matters less and the workmanship review matters more, so we scale it accordingly. If the house has had additions or a remodel, it is worth having somebody check how that work got tied in. That is where newer houses hide their problems.
Get it looked at before the deadline
We are Veteran Owned and Operated, Stephen is a Master Plumber, and we started this company in 2022 because too many people around here were being told what a plumber wanted them to hear. On a pre-purchase inspection that cuts both ways. If the house is sound we say so, and finding nothing is a perfectly good result to pay for.
If you are under contract on something in Longview, Tyler, Kilgore, Henderson, or Marshall, call 903-570-3051 with your option period date and we will get somebody out there. You can also send us the address and the details, and our gallery shows the kind of work we turn out once the house is yours. Built to last starts with knowing what you are buying.