Emergency medicine changes how you see houses. Where most buyers see a charming staircase, I see the most common mechanism of injury for the over-65 patients I’ve treated. Where a listing photo shows a cozy garage workshop, I’m looking for the carbon-monoxide pathway into the bedrooms above it.
I don’t say that to make houses scary. The opposite, actually: almost everything that makes a home genuinely dangerous is visible, fixable, and cheap to address — if you know to look. This is the walkthrough I run in my head in every house, and now run for my buyers. It takes about ten minutes. Bring it with you to your next showing.
Falls are the injury I’ve seen most, and stairs are where the serious ones happen — especially for kids, grandparents, and anyone carrying a laundry basket. In a showing, check four things:
Scald burns — especially on small children — are among the most preventable injuries that come through an emergency department. The fix costs nothing: the water heater’s thermostat should be set to 120°F. Higher settings can burn a child in seconds. At a showing, you can simply look at the dial; at the inspection, ask for the measured temperature at the tap. If the current owners kept it cranked, that’s a thirty-second adjustment on day one.
Every buyer knows homes need smoke alarms. Fewer know the placement standard: inside every bedroom, outside each sleeping area, and on every level of the home — and alarms older than ten years get replaced, not trusted. Check manufacture dates on the back; sellers’ alarms are very often past their service life.
Carbon monoxide deserves equal respect, and it’s where house layout matters. Gas furnace or range, gas water heater, fireplace, or — the big one — an attached garage: any of these means you want CO alarms on every level and near every sleeping area. CO is odorless, and the early symptoms look like the flu. You will not detect it without a detector; that’s the entire point.
This one is local. Much of East Tennessee — including the Knoxville area — sits in the EPA’s highest-potential zone for radon, a naturally occurring, invisible gas that seeps from bedrock into basements and crawl spaces and is a leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers. You cannot see it, smell it, or guess it from the neighborhood; two houses on the same street can test completely differently.
The good news is the whole problem is testable and fixable: a radon test is one of the cheapest add-ons to a home inspection, and if levels come back high, a mitigation system is a well-understood fix — a sealed pipe and fan, not a renovation. I recommend the test to every buyer here, full stop. It’s the cheapest peace of mind in the transaction.
Two fire risks nobody photographs: a dryer that vents through a long, lint-packed run (feel the duct; check where it exits), and a house so short on outlets that the sellers live on power strips. The first is a cleaning task and occasionally a re-route; the second tells you something real about the electrical capacity you’re buying.
One more lens, and it’s the one I wish more buyers used: will this house still be safe for you — or your parents — in twenty years? A bedroom and full bath on the main level, an entrance that could take a ramp without drama, doorways wide enough for a walker, a shower you step into rather than over. You don’t have to need any of it today. Houses with those bones simply keep more options open, for aging parents visiting now and for the version of you that will own this home longer than you think.
None of this replaces a professional home inspection — it sharpens it. Walk in with this list and you’ll ask your inspector better questions, read the report with better eyes, and negotiate repairs that actually matter instead of cosmetic wins.
And if you want an agent who runs this walkthrough with you by habit — that’s literally how I work. Whether you’re a clinician relocating to a Knoxville hospital, a veteran putting your VA loan to work, or a family that just wants a safe place to land in East Tennessee, start the conversation.
■ TASHA FRANCIS IS A U.S. ARMY VETERAN, PRACTICING EMERGENCY-MEDICINE PA, AND REAL ESTATE AGENT WITH KELLER WILLIAMS GREATER KNOXVILLE.
