Plumbing issues with our first house

[Frank Ngo]

My fiance and I recently purchased a house from someone who had owned her house since 1992, and had made only necessary repairs while living in it. Upon listing her house for sale to move out of the state, she remodeled the whole house in order to make it more appealing to sell. Unfortunately, she hired a lazy contractor who ostensibly worked in haste as we found out a lot of the workmanship was poor. However, with the several issues that we did see, there didn’t seem to be anything major that our home inspector saw during the process of closing escrow.

Fast forward two weeks to moving in, our house abruptly did not have hot water, and was only able to produce lukewarm water at best. We couldn’t find anything wrong with the water heater (brand new, previous owner bought in Nov 2020) except that it would run non-stop. Then, there subsequently was water leaking onto the floor from the closet adjacent to the water heater. Again we didn’t find anything wrong with the water heater, but we suspected that there may be some issues with the installation of it. I asked my dad, who had done construction for over 30 years, and he told me that he thinks it may have been the pipes leading to/going out of the water heater; he has a feeling that the person who had installed it may have not let the water in the house run for a day to see if there are any leaks prior to soldering the pipes and encasing it within the walls.

The next day, we wake up to find the flooring has been damaged due to some underlying water damage that started from the leak we found next to the closet, and the extent of the floor damage trickled to the living room and kitchen. To make matters worse, we also hear what seems to be a burst pipe between the walls of our two bathrooms, which are far away from the leaking closet; it sounds like there is rain within the walls.