Owning your own home

This forum has truly turned into Mumsnet.

You can't delete double posts there either.

Ah thought you'd have it covered. Especially as the place had damp! Sounds good.

Had a bit of a freak out researching trickle vents after you said that. I suspect that most problems arise from tightly closed windows though. I like an open window me.

Bloody hell, nothing is easy about buying a house in london is it?!

I have something similar. She's called a cleaner.

Yep, they handled the whole lot - from ripping out the old one and breaking up floor tiles to fitting, electrics, plumbing, plastering, tiling etc. We're in South but I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to cover North

Try as I'd might, I just couldn't get our cleaner to stop throwing bits of our coffee machine down the sink. Infuriating.

Busy weekend ahead...

We bought ours from a store that did free install - absolute lifesaver

Oh damn - NOW you tell me...

hehe

There’s probably some templates you can download online

These kinda things require a bit more accuracy than the average set of shelves.

Mine only took me a morning - just make sure you get the first upright installed perfectly then work across the wall using 3 shelves assembled to hold the next upright square and in position each time. You can basically build the whole thing floating from just one fixed upright and mark up all the fixing holes in one go.

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If you know a friendly architect you might be able to borrow a laser level which would probably make it a lot easier

Ballpark figure for for stripping + painting external woodwork + painting masonry on a two bed semi?

Top tip - thanks. Mine are lower, but wider so in theory should be straightforward. The missus has sketched out the plan - I'm just the fixer.
Thankfully the majority of it will be fixed to a normal wall rather than one of our solid concrete ones which are a nightmare to fix to.

Coming up to 8 weeks since we put our first bid in on 1x quite overpriced flat (fully expecting the vendor to retort by chipping away at the asking price) I'm now close to offering something within 2% of said asking price (grrr).
How serious does the damage to the rear wall look? Ours would be the ground floor, assuming freeholder would be responsible for any structural causation?

Anyone have any horror stories about freeholders (deliberately) fucking up your apartment sale?
Feel free to share. Need to know what I might be getting myself into.

Could be the render is non porous so any moisture building up around the windows it causing it to crack which has been attempted to cover up on the cheap

^ this. And the guttering is look incomplete.

The water look like it's draining over the window ledge and onto the wall behind the render, which is then preventing it from drying out.

The damage may just be to the render, which is a quick fix. Just remove it.

Although it may well be covering up something more serious. Which a surveyor probably won't be able to tell you, without removing the render.

Coming up to 8 weeks since we put our first bid in on 1x quite overpriced flat (fully expecting the vendor to retort by chipping away at the asking price) I'm now close to offering something within 2% of said asking price (grrr).

Seriously if you think you are paying too much then offer to pay what you think is right - you are under no obligation. The worst they can do is tell you to do one but so what?

Anyone have any horror stories about freeholders (deliberately) fucking up your apartment sale?
Feel free to share. Need to know what I might be getting myself into.

It's possible but why would they do that? Bigger freeholders can be slow and bad at providing the information required to make a sale but typically there isn't much in it for them to screw you around. Small freeholders, i.e. share of in a converted house might try to spite you if they feel you've dicked them around on money matters or in some other way.

Street neighbours are fully capable of cocking up your sale too, you can't really escape it. But if you don't want to run the increased freeholder / leasehold / share of risk do not buy a flat.

Management Companies were worse than the leaseholder when we sold our flat.
(Admittedly the council were the leaseholders and didn't GAF about much)
Mgmt Co want money for fucking everything. Even made us pay up for the remaint of the year and to "get the lawyers to sort a refund once you've moved"
And asking for £125 to produce a moving pack (which didn't cover half the things the legals had asked for)
Glad to be shot of them all.

I've heard of a few but it was mainly the case that there were terms in the lease that they wouldn't give up and making that clear rather than sabotaging for the sake of it (for instance one wouldn't remove a term in the lease that didn't allow the leaseholder to rent the property out so the buy-to-let purchase fell through).

TBF, I would say that there could be two sides to that anti buy-to-let clause. Depending on the goals of the housing association and wishes of the immediate neighbours I would reckon that such a clause could be perfectly reasonable.