Kidwell Home Inspections

Not well, inspector did not inspect entire crawl space which caused us over $8,000 in total repairs. When calling the realtor he assured us per his conversation with John this would be taken care of and don't worry, he would be in contact with us very soon. As agreed we waited, and waited with no response. After several weeks of attempting to contact him via email and by phone he finally returned my call stating he would gladly come out to reinspect and to take care of anything he missed. Unfortunately when he came out and inspected the crawl at that time he denied the damage being present while inspecting. I assured him it as it was very apparent the wood had been rotting for several months, if not years. I also mentioned you could see wood frass in all the webbing from spiders which should have told him at that time that something was eating the wood (you could see this 10+ feet away). He explained at that time we did not pay him enough to remove the webbing to check, nor did we pay him enough to further investigate behind the removable box header installation. I asked him kindly at that time what can be done as the damage was very obvious, plus he already agreed to "take care of us." At that time he offered to purchased the home back at the original purchasing price but refused to fix any damages. I explained to John my wife and I already invested over 20k in the property (new custom shed, new interior paint and new carpet across the entire home) and there is no way we could take that kind of a loss due to his poor inspection. He then got mad and asked what did we expect, I told him to honor what he had agreed to as it was obvious a full inspection was not done. He then yelled that my wife and I are liars as we BOTH were there during the inspection. At that time I reminded John that he showed up an hour early for the inspection, and upon our arrival he mentioned he was done (even though my wife and I showed up 30 minutes early to walk around the home due to being excited in purchasing our first home together). He denied having this conversation with my wife and I and denied showing up early (even though we had documentation proving so). At that time he became very hostile so I asked him to leave my home as he was not being honest. We did end up taking John to small claims court but unfortunately lost due to it was our responsibility to ask him to reinspect the home, we should not have taken his word. Our lawyer was quite shocked as he admitted openly in court the entire crawl was not inspected as well as having us sign our agreement AFTER the work had been performed. Unfortunately this still was not enough as the judge felt it was our responsibility as homeowners to not take his word. John is extremely nice when you want his business but unfortunately changes character if questioned (see online for other similar reviews), very unfortunate situation as this caused us to have over 8k in debt when purchasing our first home as a married couple. Be leery of utilizing John as your inspector, and if you do BE SURE TO INSPECT the entire home with him! Also the Scott Smith's Team highly recommended him and scheduled this all for us, so the more I think about it I almost feel they were working together in this situation.