Hastings is the Barry County seat, with a historic downtown, a housing stock that goes back well over a century in places, and a great deal of rural property in the townships surrounding it.
Older county-seat housing is often architecturally better than its price suggests and mechanically further behind than its appearance suggests. We look for knob and tube wiring surviving in walls and attics, sometimes buried under blown insulation added decades later, which is both a fire safety and an insurability question. We look for galvanized supply lines, for drain materials at the end of their service life, and for the cumulative effect of a hundred years of small alterations by people who were doing their best with what they had.
Foundations in the older housing are frequently fieldstone or early block. Some movement, some mortar loss and some moisture penetration are normal in a foundation of that age and construction. Distinguishing normal from structural is the part that requires judgment, and we would rather explain what we are seeing than issue a verdict you cannot interrogate.
Hastings sits in Barry County, which the EPA places in Radon Zone 2 with a predicted average indoor screening level between 2 and 4 pCi/L. Older basements are a common radon pathway, so testing is worth including.
