Heather and Ben moved from another state and were thrilled to purchase what seemed to be their dream home in a wonderful and safe neighborhood. Enthusiastic to share it with family and friends, they envisioned creating lasting memories in the home. However, their excitement was short-lived. Just three weeks after their arrival, the recently installed seven-month-old roof began leaking throughout the entire house. This marked the beginning of a prolonged and arduous four-year legal nightmare…
We moved here from out of state. My husband was our only income, he had finished an apprenticeship. Thankfully, I had invested in my ast house at a time when the market was lower so it gave us enough that we were able to buy kind of a dream home. It wasn’t huge or anything, but it was in a great neighborhood, so I felt safe. We just fell in love with it the first time we saw it. We were so excited to show off this home.
Three weeks after we moved in, our roof, that was only seven months old, started leaking all over the place. We had been out grocery shopping, and typical South Carolina, it had been raining for two days. We came home and pieces of the ceiling were falling down. Above that was our FROG with dormers, so we went up and found everything wet and moldy. It had basically soaked through the storage and floor areas and soaked through the ceiling into our garage.
That was the beginning of it. We were supposed to have had a warranty on the roof. When we reached out to the roofer about it, they said they weren’t going to cover it because we weren’t the ones that purchased the roof.
That started an almost four year nightmare.
The house over the next year began to decline. The walls bubbled up from moisture in the crawl space. I was sick constantly, rashes, sinus infections, bloody noses. Even my husband who is always healthy as a horse was sniffling and had a mild cough at night time.
One day he said, I think our floors are curling up around the edges and we went and looked throughout the different rooms. We actually found an area right under our bed where the wood had actually curled up and separated the whole length of the bed. The other thing that we noticed was that a lot of the wood was turning black. I thought it was dirt originally, but there was a spot in the bedroom that I had taken a picture of because I thought that maybe the floors needed sanded. Turns out it is called cupping, it is when moisture gets under the floor from the crawl space, and it had happened before there were tiny little nails from where they had nailed it back down. But because it was still wet when they nailed it back down, it caused mold to grow and that was the black coming through.
Also, while they were in the crawl space, we were informed that there was extensive mold. It was years worth of mold, an inch to two inches thick. The worst of it being on the side of the house where the bedroom was, which explains why I was so sick. I went from having three mold allergies to four. I’m doing shots, they said it is so severe that I will probably never recover from it. We had to have construction done on the house just now to finish the repairs and while it was much more minor construction then having to have your flooring ripped up or work in the crawl space, I have been struggling with rashes and I have to take two allergy pills a day, put cream on, just to control the rash. My nose is bleeding again, so we have to go through another round of mold remediation.
We have spent about $165,000 in repairs.
“In the process, we did find out that the sellers and their realtor did know about these issues because there had been sellers before who had an inspection and their inspector found everything. ”
He told them that they needed to check this out further, that this was very concerning. He even took pictures of what caused it, but the sellers had ripped out what caused it- it was overgrown vegetation on the side of the house. They ripped it out before they relisted it, but they didn’t take anything that was in that inspection even though they had a full copy, they didn’t disclose any of it. We did have an inspector, but he told us it was a fantastic house, nothing’s wrong. Just missing a valve on the hot water tank, so that’s all we did.
And of course we are in the middle of COVID during all of this, we moved in right before COVID. So trying to get contractors out was really fun. Even just trying to get supplies to do repairs. It was challenging. The house was just part of it though, there’s also the mental aspect of it.
It is stressful to go through a lawsuit as a one-income household, and I am having other health issues because I am disabled. I had to have a couple major surgeries during this time, one of them I almost died from. It was very hard on us mentally. Then we’d go to things like mediation and instead of focusing on the facts of the case, they try to tear you apart as a person. That when you are already struggling, would overwhelm my husband and I. We were already exhausted, dealing with so many house problems, contractors, and repairs, and you are trying to figure out how to pay for them.
We had to miss out on so much life at the same time, they kind of things that could help you get through the bad stuff. Not just because of COVID, we couldn’t visit them, but then they couldn’t come visit us. Even after COVID, when the mold remediation was done, we were afraid to invite our elderly parents or anybody or our niece who is seven-years-old. At the time this started my niece was three and they came to visit, and she had taken a bath in the guest bathroom tub. When they later ripped up the tub and we saw how bad it was, you could step on it and feel like you were going to fall in. We decided to rip the tub out because I was very concerned and thank goodness we did because the floor support beams were completely rotted through. And all I could think was, my niece took a bath in this three weeks ago. What if she had fallen through? Our contractor said that he was amazed she hadn’t.
It was not safe to have people in there. We were living in it though.
“It’s been a very hard four years, but we also know that we would not have been able to fight for this if we had not found Charleston Legal Access. ”
The repairs totaled $165,000, plus legal fees, and we are a one-income family. There is no way we could have done that if we hadn’t found them. The truth is that I don’t think you can come out of this feeling like you are whole, but we felt we got justice because we got to defend ourselves and we got to confront them on what they did. We didn’t have our day in court, but we got to do our depositions and we had an attorney that was strong enough that when they were being nasty with us, she would step right in. We felt like we had the support that we needed. When the depositions were against them and they would try to skip around things, she was direct and made them answer. While we didn't get the day in court and we didn’t get anywhere near what we spent on the repairs, we got enough to finish the repair and that is what we needed. We got to see them admit to things that they had been lying about for years. I think that is what lets us sleep at night.
I really struggled mentally for a good year of it. The last two years, it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t hard, but I survived it because I knew that I had someone backing me up through it. I trusted my attorney. We picked CLA because when I spoke to Sarah at CLA, we felt like she had the same morals as we did. We could also tell she cared, the passion and the care was so obvious with her.
The other attorneys just seemed numb to it, either they’d been doing it too long or they just don’t have the same personality. We wanted our lawyer to be able to fight and stand up for us, but we aren’t looking to run up attorney fees, or make this a bigger case than it has to be. We just wanted what was right for us so that we could move on with our lives. The one thing that was the big deciding factor was that we could tell she really cared, she just had that concern, that compassion that was so genuine. That’s really why we picked her over the other attorney.
A big portion of our consideration was cost, for sure.
“You never want to say, I can’t do this because I can’t afford it. We would have just not eaten if we had to, and that really would have been our situation. ”
We would not have been able to eat. We would have lived off ramen noodles and PBJs for four years, but we didn't feel like we needed to because we found an attorney who was competent and caring.
We gave our financial documents, and we were borderline on whether they would take us. Once you added in my disability, it technically put us slightly over. But I explained that I have medical bills, and like a hundred prescriptions, I mean it seems like we have a lot, but we really don’t. Sarah went to the board and showed them our stuff and said that while it looks like they make more and are over, but they are a one-income household family and one of them has a lot of medical expenses, so they made an exception to take us because she had cared so much. I’ll never forget when she called and told me, I just started bawling. Because this was the first time we had health insurance and I would be able to get the full care that I needed, but now we had all these expenses coming up. I had to do without a lot of stuff, and was in a lot of pain and suffering for several years. I thought, I’ll have to do that again. I’ll do it again, because we have to defend ourselves. If we didn’t, how could we live with that. We would have to accept that these people did awful things to us and just get away with it , so when she called and said they were going to take us, I just cried.
But I was able to still get the healthcare I needed, still pay my copays, and see my doctors as often as I needed because we weren’t a whole lot more money for the attorney. I was still able to scrape and put a little money away so that we could pay for the next big expense, related to either the house or the lawsuit. But I didn’t have to go without any medical care, which was huge.
We knew it was such a complicated case, that we thought we needed a really good firm to represent us. An attorney we talked to sold us on CLA. He said he'd been against them in court. They are good at what they do, they care and they are compassionate and I am telling you that they will not serve you wrong. I was a little hesitant, but I called and I don’t regret that. Sarah was always very aware of our financial situation and she would say, I could do this, but I want to wait til this so I am not just wasting your money. I always appreciated that because we were always scraping and saving because we always knew there was going to be another big repair or attorney expense when the case finally moved forward, so that mattered to us. She wasn’t just thinking about our case, but she was thinking about us as people.
About Charleston Legal Access
Charleston Legal Access is SC's first and only sliding-scale, nonprofit law firm. We provide affordable legal services at a price that those of moderate means can afford. Hourly rates are determined on an individual basis by a client's income and family size. Our initial screening and phone consultations with an attorney are completely free. In-person, 1-2 hour case consultations and limited assistance sessions are available for a flat fee of $50-$100. For more information please visit www.charlestonlegalaccess.org.
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