紧急求助 just close the escrow then found out water leak

各位好! 我打中文太慢， 请原谅我用英文写：

We just close the escrow on 7/27/2015 and on 7/30/2015, we went to the house to wait for a company to do garage work.

The kithchen and the dinning room are next to each other sharing one wall. On the kithchen side, there was a refrigirator next to the wall but the refrigirator was taken by the previous tenant (this house was rented out by the prevois owner).

On 7/30/2015, while we were waiting for the company to do some work in the garage, we sat down on the carpet by the wall between the kitchen and dining room. We felt that the carpet was wet after a few minutes. We stood up and looked carefully and found the baseboard is slightly swollen. We followed the swollen baseboard and found that on the otherside of wall (in kitchen), the valve behind the refrigerator was leaking. There was tape on it, so one cannot see the leak from a distance, but when you look carefully, the water is seeping into the wall from the valve. We tried to tighten the valve, but it was already tight.

There could have been some leak before, but the major leak most likely happened after the tenet removed the refrigerator. They probably knew about the leak, so they used some tape to wrap the outlet.

The bottom portion of the wall was sprayed white, so most likely the same thing happened before and the sprayed paint was to cover the water mark and the mold.

We don’t know if the owner and seller agent knew about this or not, but we believe it is the seller’s responsibility to take care of the repair. Currently our planned move has to be postponed because we cannot move before the repair is done.

Our agent has sent emails/pictures and request the previous owner to fix the basebord, mold, valve, and wet carpet. The email was sent to the seller's agent, and we are still waiting for their response. If the seller ingores our request, who we should seek help? Can we hire a laywer to handle this situration?


Please advies.


Thanks！！