Damage can sometimes occur during a home inspection

Q. The people who are buying our home hired a home inspector. During the inspection, he was filling the spa tub in our upstairs bathroom and he filled it nearly to the top. Unfortunately, a leak in the overflow drain caused water to drip through the kitchen ceiling and onto the floor, damaging our new oak flooring. The inspector did not cover the floor and did not mop up the water. When we returned home later that day, we found the wet, warped flooring. When we contacted the inspector, he said the damage wasn't his fault because it was caused by a faulty overflow drain in the tub. This doesn't seem right to us. Shouldn't he take responsibility for this damage?

A. The home inspector has an ethical responsibility, as a professional, to own the consequences of his inspection and pay for the damaged flooring. The fact that the overflow drain was defective doesn't give him the right to walk away from the apparent consequences of that leak. He should have taken steps to prevent moisture damage to your home as soon as he saw that the leak was occurring. However, regardless of whether the damage was entirely his fault, this was an opportunity for him to establish his reputation as a responsible and concerned business person: to treat you as he would want to be treated if this happened in his own home. Thus far, he has cast that opportunity aside.

Most home inspectors can tell at least one story about a time when water damage was caused during one of their inspections. In one case, there was also an incident involving an overfilled spa tub. While waiting for the tub to fill, the buyer asked the inspector to look at something she'd noticed in the garage. Fifteen minutes later, they were still conversing in the garage when the inspector remembered the bathtub. Sprinting through the house, he arrived too late, finding the master bedroom carpet completely soaked and water beginning to wick into the drywall.

In that situation, some inspectors might have said, "You shouldn't have interrupted me when I was doing my work." That would have been as plausible as blaming the overflow drain for the damage that occurred in your home. Instead, the inspector called a water damage restoration company and paid the cost of drying the carpet and repairing the damaged walls. That was not an extraordinary response to the situation. It was simply a matter of doing what was right, as he would have wanted a professional to do if the same thing had happened in his own home.

The home inspector in your situation needs to do the same: to restore your home to the condition in which he found it when he began his inspection. If he refuses, you can take him to small claims court. Another approach would be to insist that the buyers accept the damaged flooring in as-is condition since it was their inspector who caused the damage.

• To write to Barry Stone, visit him on the web at www.housedetective.com, or write AMG, 1776 Jami Lee Court, Suite 218, San Luis Obispo, CA 94301.

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