Your inspection report looks terrifying. It is probably fine.

Every inspection report on every house lists dozens of items. That is the job. The inspector is paid to write down everything, and a twenty-year-old house in normal condition will generate pages of it. Your first read will feel like the place is falling apart.

Sort it. At the top: structure and foundation, roof, water intrusion and drainage, electrical safety, plumbing leaks, heating system age. Anything where water is getting somewhere it should not be goes near the top automatically, because water damage compounds.

At the bottom: missing outlet covers, a sticking door, a loose railing, a GFCI that needs swapping. These are a Saturday, not a negotiation. Treating them like emergencies is a good way to burn credibility on the items that actually matter.

In the middle is where judgment lives, and it is where having someone who has read a few hundred of these earns their keep. A twenty-year-old roof is not the same finding as a twenty-year-old roof with active leaks and three layers of shingles.

When you negotiate, lead with safety and systems. Ask for a credit rather than repairs when you can, because then you control who does the work and how well it gets done. Sellers rushing a repair before closing are optimizing for cheap and fast, which is rarely what you want inside your walls.

And sometimes the right answer is to walk. Losing an inspection fee beats inheriting a problem you cannot afford. That is exactly what the inspection period is for.