Jimenez Julien
Founder of MLJ, SASU, publication director of slabtoroof.com, and the person who answers the email address at the bottom of every page on this site.
Why I built SlabToRoof
The first inspection I ever followed end to end was a 1958 ranch outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, in February. The inspector, a one truck operator with sixteen years on the job, spent three hours and forty minutes in the house and then another two hours and fifty minutes at his kitchen table that night, turning a voice recorder and 214 photographs into a document. He was good at the first part and worn down by the second. When I asked him what the software he paid for actually did, he said it gave him a place to type. That gap, between the skilled work in the crawlspace and the unpaid typing afterward, is the whole reason this product exists.
I build software for trades where a document is the deliverable. In home inspection that is unusually true: the client never sees the flashlight work, the awkward attic hatch or the forty minutes spent tracing a hidden drain line. They see a report. The agent sees a report. If it arrives late, or reads like a template, or shows a photo of a beige wall with no arrow on it, the skill in the field is invisible. So SlabToRoof is not a general purpose form builder that happens to serve inspectors. It is a report assembly line with the field work at one end and an agent inbox at the other, and every decision inside it is judged by whether it gets a defensible report out the same evening.
What I learned about this trade
Three things changed how I designed the product. First, inspectors are liability managers as much as they are technicians, and wording matters more than layout: the observation, the implication and the recommendation have to stay separable, editable and traceable back to a photograph with a timestamp. Second, the listing agent is a second customer nobody sells to. If the summary cannot be forwarded to a seller without retyping, the inspector loses referral work they never find out about. Third, the crawlspace has no signal. Any tool that assumes a connection under a 1920s bungalow in Waukegan will get abandoned in week two.
I also learned to respect the standards of practice rather than reinvent them. The InterNACHI and ASHI outlines, and the state specific ones in Texas, Florida and North Carolina, are the spine of the product because they are the spine of the trade. We do not add a step to that route. We follow it.
How I work with inspectors
Ride alongs, mostly. Since 2023 I have spent parts of two inspection seasons in trucks in Indiana, Arizona, Illinois, Texas and North Carolina, carrying the ladder and staying out of the way. Every month I run a call with a group of twenty operators, half of them solo and half of them running a second inspector, and I read every support message myself before it is answered. Features that do not survive a real Tuesday get removed. The offline capture behavior, the severity sorting in the summary and the repair request export all came from that group, not from a roadmap document.
Experience and expertise
- Eleven years building document heavy software for regulated and licensed trades, including field capture tools used on job sites without reliable coverage.
- Two full inspection seasons of ride alongs across five states, covering slab on grade, full basement and pier and beam housing stock.
- Working knowledge of the InterNACHI and ASHI standards of practice, state licensing report requirements, and the ancillary services inspectors bundle: radon, sewer scope, wood destroying insects and four point reports.
- Founder of MLJ, SASU, registered with the Paris commercial court registry, publisher of this site and of a small family of tools for US operators.
How this product is built and maintained
Every number published on this site comes from delivery logs or from an inspector who agreed to be quoted by name. When a figure changes, the page changes with it. Testimonials are collected in writing, attributed with a full name, a business and a city, and removed the day a customer asks. Pricing on the pricing table is the price you pay; there is no per report surcharge waiting behind a demo call.
On the engineering side, the rules are boring on purpose. Photos and reports are stored in United States data centers with encryption in transit and at rest. Exports are a first class feature, not a retention obstacle: one action gives you every PDF, every original image and a CSV of your history. Changes to the report engine ship behind a review that includes at least one working inspector, because a defect numbering bug is not a cosmetic issue when a report ends up in a dispute. Support is answered by people who have written inspection reports, and I answer the escalations.
Published articles
Everything I have written so far for The Defect Log, the magazine SlabToRoof publishes for licensed home inspectors, with the date each piece went out.
- How to Add EPA Protocol Radon Testing to Your Inspection Days
- Roof Access Compared: Walking, Drone, Ladder, and Ground Level
- Report Wordings That Turn a Home Inspection Into a Claim
- Florida Wind Mitigation and 4-Point Forms: Rules and Credentials
- Aluminum Branch Wiring: What CPSC Found and How to Report It
- Walk and Talk Inspections and Where Inspection Demand Is Heading
- The Attic Checklist: Ventilation, Insulation, and Framing Defects
- What One Inspection Costs You: Building a Per-Job Cost Model
- Field Report: Inspecting a Post-Tension Slab in Expansive Clay
The full run, with the featured photography and the reading time on each piece, is at The Defect Log.
Contact the author
If something on this site is wrong, unclear or overstated, write to me and I will correct it. If you want to argue about how a summary should be ordered, I would genuinely enjoy that call. The fastest route is jimenezjulien42@gmail.com, and you can also reach me through any of the profiles listed beside this page. For company details, registration numbers and hosting information, see the legal notice.