wrote in message
oups.com...

We bought a house (about 7 years old) in Surrey, BC, and moved in about
4 weeks ago(at the end of October).
We did a house inspection(at the end of August) in the process of the
home purchase, turned out to be fine.
But the problem occured after it started to rain in this area.
The roof is now leaking, and about 3-4 feet of the molding along the
bottom of the master room is swelled and wet. . . .

Our realtor says it's the inspectors responsibility.
But the inspector says no one is able to catch that kind of problem
because the roof seemed fine from the outside and it wasn't leaking
when he did the inspection.(it wasn't rainy, that's why!)

It appears you did not know leaky roofs on new
houses were much in the news in BC about 10 years
ago --- see back issues of newspapers. It is likely
the Sun or the Province still has a reporter specially
assigned to this topic whom you could consult.

The realtor said we could sue the inspector, but we really don't want
to take that kind of action.

In Ontario, the liability of a private house inspector is
limited to his fee, i.e. you can get your money back if
his inspection was obviously incompetent, but the
inspector is not liable for the cost of repairs he failed
to report.

Since your problem is shared with thousands of other
BC house owners, you should identify their leaky
roof groups (cf. class actions suing for redress) and
see what you can learn. Municipal or provincial
politicians probably know about these groups.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)