My husband and I had a pre-purchase home inspection done on the house we were looking to buy on 12/30/14, and chose to pay extra for a termite/pest inspection that was done at the same time. The home inspector point out some big things wrong with the house and the pest inspector said everything looked good. We received the copy of the inspection report shortly after, and did not find anything in it that wasn't discussed with me on the day of inspection. The things the home inspector did note were things my husband and I agreed were not deal breakers, and are unrelated to the current issues. We moved forward with closing on 1/28/15.
Upon moving in two weeks later, we discovered that the refrigerator, dishwasher and garbage disposal didn't work and that there would be some carpenter ants crawling around or dead inside one of the bathrooms. We decided to replace the fridge with our tax return. The dishwasher and disposal are non-essential appliances so while it sucked, we could live without. Later on we managed to fix the disposal on our own.
On 3/14, my husband and I were in our bedroom when we heard something in the attic. We have a lot of strays in the area, so I thought it may have just been a cat on the roof. He heard this noise again on 3/17, but in a different area of the house. We called a different pest company out to do another inspection to see if we have anything in the attic and to find where the carpenter ants were coming from. This new inspector was not even into the attic area when he noticed chew marks on the beams and ducts in the attic. We have rats. As he was going further in, things kept getting worse. The insulation is shot due to all the urine, more chew marks are found, and... rat traps. My husband and I did not put them there, so they would have been there since before our original pre-purchase inspections. Both original pest inspectors as well as the home inspector were in the same part of the attic that the new inspector was in. None of the original three mentioned the rats in the attic. The new inspector said that given the extent of the damage the rats have been up there for "a while" and there was no way that this happened in three months. Especially when someone knew enough to go up there to put traps out. The estimate to have both the rats and ants exterminated, the insulation removed, the attic sanitized and treated plus new insulation is around $3,000.
tl:dr- Bought a new house, issues brought up in inspection were acceptable and unrelated to current issues, move in to find appliances not working, carpenter ants and rats in the attic. $3,000 for the cleanup plus costs of new fridge
My question is, do we have any recourse to go back to the inspection and pest companies to cover at least the cost of extermination/cleanup? To me it seems like incompetence to not notice the appliances not working, and to either overlook the rat infestation or not say anything about them.
Submitted March 20, 2015 at 10:59PM by firedancer1172 http://ift.tt/1CEQpor legaladvice
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