Owning your own home

You've a three month window essentially, June-August. The rest of the year it's too cold to be able to ride much over 1000 metres.

Banyere has got an awesome thermal spa though...

Col du Tourmalet, 2115m, 2nd October 2014:

I was there when there was some sort of knitwear convention:

It was fairly busy, early September, cafe was open.

Strong pose. Very catalogue. Suits cardigans.

So, we're buying that hotel, add en suites, rewire, make the bar funky with squishy sofas and bicycle posters, make the garden lovely and fix hanging baskets so the hotel's smothered in red, white and blue flowers, when the tour goes past the image will flash round the world, this time next year we'll be millionaires.

^ do you work for LMNH?

It can be nice in April too, but the weather is so variable, even in high summer, that you can't depend on it.

If you're going to market the hotel as a great base for mountain training camps then realistically you're restricted to high season.

Stranded in a snowbound hotel over winter, what's the worst that could happen?

The difference between the French and Spanish sides was amazing back in 1999. One side was bereft of any active commerce, the other side was teeming with tourists.

what's the worst that could happen?

A really crappy remake, or a really crappy miniseries?

So a van that sells coffee and cake that can park up at the top of the Tourmalet would be a wise addition to the catering budget?

Fit a combi

What about just putting a pump on the bottom of the cylinder to increase the pressure for the whole house?
The mixer shower thus becomes a power shower but without the power shower hipster tax.

party wall got agreed on wed night so i gave the builder the go ahead on thurs morning.
by fri they'd ripped out the old loft, errected the scaffolding front and back. on sat 10 blokes came round and they man handled the rsj's up the scaffolding which was a terrific sight. proper old school hard graft.
they also took delivery of all the raw materials and set the pad stones. they are working at one hell of a pace.

4 Attachments

Out of interest, is your house an ex-warner property?

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no just a mid terrace

I live in an end terrace in the middle of the street giving rear access. Our none adjoining neighbours have right of way down the alley and a gate into their garden. Our joining neighbours don't. They (joining) recently had a tree cut back (at our request) and used the ally to remove the branches. All fine. Sat morning I got a text saying "...Just want to check that you're happy for us to use your garden and path as access (for 1 week to get the garden re done starting Monday)". The text was pretty presumptuous.

Any workmen would have to come and go across our garden for the week while we are out at work. No real details were given. We didn’t return the text as we weren’t sure how we wanted to reply and were pretty busy. Neighbour doorstepped us (whilst in our dressing gowns) on Sunday for a reply which was; no they can’t have unrestricted access with no details of what will be happening. This went badly with comments such as “you let us have it when it benefited you, but now it’s of no benefit to won’t allow it” (a ref to the tree surgery which took 1 day), “well how are we meant to do it now, we can’t get a shed through the house” and lots of sighing and shoulder shrugging. I offered the compromise that they we could allow things that can’t go through the house to come down the alley but not the alley as an access point is she can work out the details. During the conversation she didn’t acknowledge this as a compromise but carried on with the emotive hard sell. She hasn’t come back to me any compromise or details so I can only assume that she taken it badly and given it up. By her overall actions I’d guess finding us unreasonable.

I don’t really want to restrict access to them but I don’t want to give someone unrestricted access for reasons of injury liability, security, potential of damage, not knowing the volume of workmen/work, potential to overrun, but also because she has been so presumptuous and went straight for the hard sell using emotional blackmail trying to turn it around in 48 hours with no details.

My question is: looking past the obvious bias in my write up, am I being unreasonable? How much access would you give a neighbour?

Depends how much I liked the neighbour and whether or not I was happy letting them have access. In your case, I don't think you're being unreasonable at all. You've provided the terms on which you're prepared to give access (which don't themselves seem unreasonable) and she's gone off in a huff. At the end of the day, getting access to her property is her problem, not yours. You've offered to help resolve it, and she's grumpy because she'd assumed she could just do whatever she wanted traipsing over your garden with all and sundry. Well, screw that.

These things are a minefield, at the very least the requestor should present a schedule of proposed works and access required, including dates and times. Get everything in writing.

That was my stance. They are nice, I like her husband more but he seems to be keeping out of it.

I see my 2 options are; do nothing or go back to them and reiterate the terms of any compromise we be willing to do to help them to get their garden done in a manner that will leave neither party feeling hard done by. problem is that I think she has handled it badly enough to make it very had to get to the point where we are all happy.

A not quite the same but the same situation was on a Grand Designs once. Someone needed to use the space in some adjoining gardens to get the work done on their house. Unfortunately one of those gardens belonged to a property lawyer who knew what we was talking about and they had to pay to effectively rent the garden space.

If you wanted to be unreasonable you could do this. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to know details about who will be coming onto your property when you are not there.

I really don't want money, I just want it on my terms with some form of protection from my perceived risks and details of what will be happening. I want to minimise the short and long term impact on my garden.

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