personal legal question (personal advice forum is full of idiots)

[dai the flu]

the reason im asking this here is because this forum (seemingly) has the only educated people on this board. and my lawyer isnt available for a week.

i bought a house last year with a two car garage. the garage was appraised at a certain amount and all that stuff.
while doing some minor renovating work on the garage, i discovered that the roof beams, attic crawlspace area and all that had been on fire at some point.
that had never been disclosed when we bought the house.
i had a contractor friend look at it and the fire damage is fairly extensive and the building is not anywhere near the amount it was appraised for. in fact its not very stable at all and may need to be tore down.
is there any legal action that i could possibly take?

obviously i wont base much on what is said here, ill talk to my lawyer when i get the chance and see what he thinks, but this was on my mind and i wanted some other opinions.

[Justin_stacy]

the reason im asking this here is because this forum (seemingly) has the only educated people on this board. and my lawyer isnt available for a week.

i bought a house last year with a two car garage. the garage was appraised at a certain amount and all that stuff.
while doing some minor renovating work on the garage, i discovered that the roof beams, attic crawlspace area and all that had been on fire at some point.
that had never been disclosed when we bought the house.
i had a contractor friend look at it and the fire damage is fairly extensive and the building is not anywhere near the amount it was appraised for. in fact its not very stable at all and may need to be tore down.
is there any legal action that i could possibly take?

obviously i wont base much on what is said here, ill talk to my lawyer when i get the chance and see what he thinks, but this was on my mind and i wanted some other opinions.

The same thing happened to me........we bought a house last year and found rot in the masonite that was covered up, about 6 months later, which wasn't declared in the sellers contract.

The problem with us was our home inspector didn't find it in the original inspection, so suing would have been tough, although we probably would have won because of the purposeful effort taken to cover up the damage. So even if your inspector didn't find it you could probably still sue and win, but it will be at a great up front cost.....our damage was about $1,500, if done by a professional, and me and my wife decided it wasn't worth the hassle of suing.....

[getupkid53]

He's right, if your inspector didn't find it, you'll have a hard time suing. You have to decide what's more important to you ethics, or cash. If you have the cash laying around, you should sue them purely for ethical reasons..
You'd be better off finding where the old owners live, and lighting their garage on fire.

[splitsecond]

Well I am in my 3rd year of law school... so I know enough about this to give you an opinion (but not "advice"... I wouldnt want to get disbarred before I even practiced)

In most states a seller is under a duty to disclose major known defects in a building. Small defects that are "latent" (hidden) generally arent under a duty of disclosure, but big ones that should be known to the seller are.

The question you have here is whether the guy who sold it to you even knew the defects existed. On top of that, you have to read your contract of sale to see if they disclaimed all defects not discovered by your inspector.

I think if you can prove the people knew about the defect, you can sue them. On top of that, if its something your inspector should have found, you can go after him too for negligence.

[Louballs]

I'm a law student, too, and (although this is not legal advice) I pretty much agree with the guy above. Only other thing to remember is, in contract suits, they're probably only going to give you the difference in value of the garage. If it's going to cost you more than that (or even the same amount) to sue, there's probably not much point. Also, there are some cases where you might not even get the difference in value--courts have sometimes only awarded however much it would cost just to repair/fix the damaged parts.

[dai the flu]

ok thanks for all your help guys, im still undecided so far, but at least now i have some idea what i could be getting into, if i even want to get into it now.