Owning your own home

It could be more than £150k if your freeholder hires a connected company to do the works and inflates the bill all over the place. Although maybe you are share of freehold so avoid these problems.

Ask me how I know...

Ha I bet, thankfully the place is Right to Manage...

Hadn't even heard of Bushwood. The road right? Nice to be next to the forest.

You did all your DIY so quickly I'm not surprised that the next step is on the agenda sooner than expected :)

In other news:

Yeah I know it's a 30 semi but trust me, we'll just paint it grey and stick it on the market with Foxtons, we'll clean up!
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-46384431.html

lol

Ask me how I know...

What did you do in that situation?

Started saving. Once they serve the Section 20 (IIRC) notices there is precious little you can do as a leaseholder to halt the process without getting dragged to court, with the requirement to pay their legal costs when you lose.

That is a Good Thing, although you need to hope your fellow leaseholders are reasonable people.

Yeah, ideally that road but the house is just off it. It's a nice, quiet area - near the woods but also nearer to Leytonstone.

That's partly it yeah, though we've still quite a bit to do to the outside. This one was a bit of a learning experience, so the next one we've some other ideas for and learnt a fair bit

#gastropubgrey

Surely a couple of pairs of antlers will add 10%?

Flooring question folks... I assumed replacing floorboards in a house would be crazy money... but a quick google is telling me otherwise... anyone had it done? Small 2 bed flat - currently creaky old floor boards throughout with lots of shitty gaps. Would like non creaky and shitty.

That decking looks more slippy than a very slippery thing.

Also is it just me or are the bathroom windows moldy at the edges?

You may be able to solve the creakiness by just fixing them down more securely - if they're nailed down, maybe some of the nails have worked loose?
Gaps between boards, well you can get pine slivers or the draughtex stuff mentioned earlier although I haven't used either.
Not saying don't replace it but there may not be a need to write it off

@chrisbmx116 have used both slivers and a kind of sawdust mixed with glue. Neither great. Draughtext sounds interesting. To reiterate what @rhowe said, hammering boards down got rid of all our creaks when we sanded. There are a couple of looser ones a year on but easy to remedy. That said the biggest issue we have is that glue/sawdust mixture flaking up in lines between the boards - we have a dark stain on old pine boards so seeing the contrast annoys me no end.

In the next house it'll definitely be a project to get thick hardwood boards down in their natural colour. Ideally properly fitted/locking ones rather than literally lifting up the carpets and using the boards that were there, which is what we did. Found the pine ones to be too loud/flimsy/chippable. Would want some kind of sound proofing in the next house too (though appreciate this has limits).

I'd also consider a manufactured material I don't know the name of - my father in law has it in his kitchen - it must be some kind of polymer or something but it's hard as nails so doesn't scratch when you slide chairs over it but looks exactly like wood. Doesn't feel like it under foot but a relatively small price to pay to not have pockmarks all over the floor every time you sit in a chair.

But it's got a bay-fronted living room! That's unique! Although the house next door looks awfully similar externally, and I can't imagine that no-one else in the street has thought of knocking the two rooms together...

Or your could challenge the reasonableness of any service charges in the First Tier Tribunal, which is a no-costs jurisdiction unless you've acted unreasonably or unless there's a contractual entitlement on the part of the lessor to recover costs under the terms of your lease. But if the work needs doing and the costs are reasonable, there's little scope for winning on that front.

Talcum powder or similar can help with the creaking short term.
Brushed a liberal amount into the stairs when we replaced carpets, and it reduced the creaking enormously.

@chrisbmx116 - do you want to replace all the floorboards in your flat? If so, I'd get someone in to do it. Thats a fairly big job (time-wise) and they'll have all the right tools for lifting/cutting boards. If its just replacing old shitty ones then you can do that yourself.

Are you looking at having them exposed so they need to look smart or or you putting carpet or something over them?

I ended up ripping all the floorboards up in my kitchen after sourcing some relatively new floorboards from a house that was being gutted. Got them pretty "snug" and used Bona (fnar) Gap Master to fill the gaps which has thus far been really good.

Cheers for the replies all @CYOA @rhowe @andos !

The floorboards are shit, look great at a glance but they are ropey as hell. As are the skirting boards. Kinda feel my flat needs some proper sorting after decades of bodge jobs (most before I moved in although I did cut a cat flap with a bread knife....).

Fuck me thats grim.

There was a place down the road form me (near Hack Wick) that looks like it was done up by/for a Saudi Prince - it was on the market for 4 mil, 100 yards from the A12 and the wrong side of Victoria park. Lols.

@chrisbmx116 yeah ours were the same, we had quite a lot of rotten ones in the kitchen from years of water being spilt and then there was evidence of boring beetles or something, so I ripped the whole lot out and relayed them. It was however the hardest thing I did in the flat as I had to recut and plane all the other floorboards.

You might be better off pinning them all down with screws (watch for pipes / wires etc) to stop the creaking, ply lining all the rooms with 8mm ply and getting someone to relay engineered flooring or something similar. In my opinion the results would be better and would make the floor feel a lot more solid.

@chrisbmx116. I'm assuming you want exposed floorboards? Unless the floorboards are in really bad condition you shouldn't need to replace them. It's amazing what a sanding can do.
I wanted exposed floorboards but had quite large draughty gaps so I ripped them up. First one was hardest but after that you can take a mallet to them from underneath. Once they were all up I took the opportunity to staple some insulation under the joists. When nailing the boards back down I hired a floorboard clamp https://www.hss.com/hire/p/floor-board-clamp to squeeze the boards together thus eliminating gaps. Doing this you will be left with a residual gap that will be narrower than a floorboard so you will need to source an extra floorboard for that.
Whatever you do, as a courtesy thing let the neighbours know as its f**king loud!

Does anyone have general recommendations for kitchen work tops? Spec'ing my new kitchen now. All I've learned from here I think is that wooden tops look nice but are a pain in the arse to maintain. I cook every day and spill stuff on the worktopsn. Currently have a hideous Formica top, but functionally it's great as it's not slippy, handles hot pans, etc.

Yeah, we went round and round with our counsel on this but couldn't justify the risks in the end.

Our particular freeholder / management company has a history of being highly litigious, as detailed online as infinitum.

I went wood... And regret it.

If I was doing it again I'd go for that reconstituted stone stuff. It can be stratched but it's pretty resilient - my brother has it in his place.