What Should I Look for During a New Home Walkthrough?

The final walkthrough of a new build is your last real chance to see the home before you own it, and builders expect a detailed list. Do not be rushed. Plan to spend one to two hours, bring a flashlight, a tape measure, some floor stickers to mark issues, and your phone for photos and video. Work every room systematically: floors, walls, ceilings, then fixtures.

Check paint and drywall first because they hide the most. Look for unpainted areas, drips, roller marks, and nail pops along walls and trim. Run your hand along baseboards at the seams. In a freshly painted home these sins are easy to miss under bright staging lights, so angle your flashlight along the wall to catch texture problems.

Doors, Windows, and Cabinets

Open and close every door and window, including closets and the attic hatch. Doors that rub, windows that stick, and hardware that rattles are punch list items, but note them anyway. Check weatherstripping for gaps and confirm windows lock cleanly on both sashes. Cabinets deserve special attention in new construction, where alignment issues are common: open every door and drawer, check for square gaps, and make sure soft-close hardware actually catches.

New homes fail electrical checks less often than cosmetic ones, but the wiring deserves its own pass. Test every outlet with a plug-in tester, confirm the GFCI outlets are in the wet locations and actually trip, and check that the breaker panel is labeled so a future owner can find the kitchen circuit in the dark. Open the panel cover and look at the workmanship: neat, labeled wiring is a proxy for the care the electrician took everywhere else in the house.

In the attic, verify the insulation depth matches the spec, the vents are not blocked by insulation, and the bathroom exhausts terminate outside the roof rather than dumping moisture into the attic cavity. Master bedrooms with ceiling wiring for fans can be an upgrade that walks; if the spec promised pre-wire, confirm it exists. Smoke and carbon monoxide detectors should be tied to the electrical system where code requires, and each should have a battery backup that you can see.

Finish the electrical pass in the garage: a 220-volt circuit for electric vehicle charging is worth checking even if you do not own an EV, because adding capacity to a finished panel later is far costlier than confirming the stub is already there.

Turn on every faucet and let it run, one at a time and then several together to test water pressure. Check for slow drains in the sinks and tubs, and look inside the cabinets underneath for drips, loose connections, and missing escutcheons. Flush every toilet twice, and let a tub fill briefly so you can watch the overflow function and check the seal at the tile line.

Test the HVAC while you are there: run the heat and the air conditioning if the season allows, and confirm every register in every room actually delivers air. A builder mid-summer may not have tested the furnace; a builder in winter may not have run the AC. Finished basements and bonus rooms are where builders forget duct balancing, so linger there. Run the dishwasher and the washing machine on a short cycle if they are installed, and confirm the disposal and range hood are actually connected.

Walk the perimeter of the house. Confirm gutters are pitched and downspouts extend well away from the foundation, and that the ground slopes away from the walls so water does not pool against the basement. This is one of the most common new construction defects, and it is invisible from the model home's front porch. Look at the roofline for wavy shingles and check that attic vents are not blocked by insulation.

Some builders allow professional inspectors at the final walkthrough; Pennsylvania buyers should take advantage of that right whenever it is offered. An independent inspector catches what a buyer's eye misses, and the few hundred dollars is trivial against a foundation crack you discover at year three. If the walkthrough happens before final landscaping, write down the condition of the grading and sod so there is a record if the lawn never takes.