the essential
A few months after buying their first home, a couple discovered that wastewater from the shower and toilet was draining into a crawl space that served as a septic tank.
A couple of first-time buyers thought they had made the purchase of their dream. They were soon disillusioned. On RTL radio, they told the story of how a lifelong dream turned into a nightmare in the space of a few months.
“Tape holds PVC together”
A year after buying the house, the couple began to notice “some drainage problems” at the washing machine. “I put some product to unclog the drains,” explains the husband, Eric. But these problems continued and he concluded that the problem came from lower down. So he checked the condition of the crawl space and found that the PVC pipe network was not compliant. “Tape holds the PVC and everything was done in a hurry,” he testified to our colleagues. The toilet and shower drain pipes were broken, “all the excrement ended up in the crawl space.” Result: the couple has to live with nauseating odors.
The hidden defect argument
“It’s a hidden defect because I doubt that the sellers warned that there was a lot of junk in the crawl space,” explained lawyer Anne-Claire Moser. According to the law, the couple has two years to take action against the sellers using this hidden defect argument.
Contacted by our colleagues, the sellers, now separated, are turning a deaf ear… The former owner has memory problems and her ex-husband is unreachable… In the meantime, “we rented a motor pump to empty the crawl space”, laments Eric.
