Owning your own home

Also mortgage lenders might extend your mortgage to pay for obtaining the freehold on the basis that it increases the value of your home.

In Austin for work. It seems like a pretty great place.

How is your house coming along? I'm in awe of what you are taking on - it looks way too much like hard work - but you'll have a great (and way more valuable) house at the end of it.

Can anyone recommend a thorough surveyor to carry out a full structural on a potential purchase?

Please and thanks.

We got a loan and some savings plus trying to save 3/4k per month since completing. This won't be enough to finished everything but we will hopefully have a decent chunk of it paid for and then do things as and when

We're doing it with savings. You could hold back some of your deposit in cash and get a larger mortgage.

Flexible mortgage innit. You can just draw out your equity, up to a point.

It was my understanding that (with some exceptions) if the majority of leaseholders wanted to buy the lease, the landlord has no option but to sell. Granted, they don't have to be reasonable which can increase the price or drag the process out.

My lease has 92 years remaining so I should be doing something about it sooner or later. Would extending it now significantly affect the cost of acquiring a share of the freehold in the not too distant future?

If the majority of the leaseholders want to buy the freehold, the freeholder can't refuse. If they don't want to sell then you might have to go to arbitration.
IMO there isn't much point extending the lease if you're going to buy the freehold in the future - running the lease past 90 years would only cause a very slight depreciation in the valuation of the property and you aren't looking to sell.

Once you form the freehold company you can just set a new lease at 999 years.

I'm in Austin next week. It's for work but looking forward to not thinking about the house for a bit!

House is going ok. Boiler, kitchen and bathroom are all getting booked in

Another wall coming down this weekend, gutting the rest of the kitchen and plastering the main bedroom.

That's between two of us with no kids etc gotta make the most of it whilst we can!

Go to Franklins bbq and get soft end of brisket.

Would extending it now significantly affect the cost of acquiring a share of the freehold in the not too distant future?

No, it'll decrease it slightly. Potentially by quite a lot, but only if you have a tenant-owned head-lessee so you can do the Nailrile double-stage enfranchisement.

Obviously Salt Lick too

Excuse me while I get my google on...

Sounds like a new rule in Mornington Crescent.

why? when a Bainbridge / Cockminster gambit more than ably counters a double New Malden spike (76 - 80 only).

It's almost as if some people just want more and more rules.

Mornington Crescent. Worse than puns.

Although I suspect ghell is making sexy time talk.

would i be out of order to use the drawings from the neighbour's planning app to obtain initial costs from contractors? their house is identical to ours and the work would be similar.

Nah, who's to know? I went one step further and knocked on their door to ask who their builder was and were they happy to recommend them.

This is the Nailrile decision which explains how the double-stage enfranchisement works. It's a wee bit comperlickated though.

As we're about to embark on a project I've been suffering a fair bit of property-porn TV. There's a series on the beeb at the mo called The £100k House - Tricks of the Trade which, on the face of it should be quite helpful as it's generally about projects of the size and type we're considering. I've watched 5 and a half eps now and every one of the is exactly the same:

A terribly dressed architect (soul patch, boot-cut jeans, collarless leather jacket, backpack, pony tail etc) convinces some hapless prole with a shoe-string budget to remove all the walls and half the ceilings from their ground floor, install giant glass bi-fold doors ("to connect the space with garden") they then finish it off with industrial concrete, one bare brick wall, a wood burner and furniture built out of scaffold boards surrounded by 6 Eames knock offs and a giant danish ceiling lamp ("as a focal point"). Furnish with Ikea rugs, half-a dozen colour-co-ordinated books and a bowl of ALL THE SAME FRUIT and voila.

What have architects got against downstairs rooms anyway? Don't get me wrong i'm not against the concept per se, it's just the certainty with which these cretins insist that this latest design fad is the logical result of thousands of years of technological and aesthetic progress. As if no-one ever thought of it before and now that they have, all our problems will be over.

You'd think TV would have learned since Changing Rooms in the 90s where every house got it's beautiful original features ripped out or boxed in with stenciled MDF. The lack of foresight is staggering.

*le sigh

Top rant. Would read again.

+1

you're thinking about it too much, al. you will drive yourself bonkers-lonkers.

Heh. I enjoy it in a perverse way. I might make a TV architect bingo-card drinking game

Just make sure the card has one large open plan box to put all the features in. Possibly made of clear acetate so it blends through to the surrounding environment.