Owning your own home

Yup. I'd have thought the dumb fridge/freezer issue above would make it quite hard to shift the place at the spendy asking as the rest of the kitchen could be new and the money they are asking is way beyond 'new owner needs to spend £100k fixing the ground floor layout' money.

(you couldn't just fix the kitchen, you'd have to fix the rest of the issues with the ground floor at the same time or you'd have to ask yourself serious questions on why you can buy a £1m+ house but not afford to put it right)

Comedy moment the other day checking out the modern kitchen that owners had put in a very spendy semi and realising that the only place you could put a full height or double fridge freezer was in the hallway under the stairs. A family home that won't take a proper sized fridge / freezer and it's 2200 sq ft! And the money they'd have wanted for it would make it the most expensive place on the street. Le sigh.

Ouch - oversight there!

5 years ago we got the keys to our place in Islington. Woo!

If I look at a house that has a cheap kitchen that I don't like, I consider that a negative.

I tried to explain this to my mother when she was selling her London house and moving to Scotland. Obviously, mothers know best.

Brand new Ikea kitchen was in a skip outside the house the week after the sale went through.

Modernising kitchens and bathrooms before sale has to be one of the most frustrating waste of money/resources.

We've been turned off a few places with brand new, horribly boring and impractical looking kitchens that we simply wouldn't buy the place knowing how much we would want to replace it but would feel too guilty to actually do it

Ah, Hadley Wood. The suburb that taste forgot.

Modernising kitchens and bathrooms before sale has to be one of the most frustrating waste of money/resources.

cc/ @6pt

Modernising kitchens and bathrooms before sale has to be one of the most frustrating waste of money/resources.

Surely the job is simply to do 'good enough' and not make any design clangers, like forgetting to allocate space for a full height fridge freezer.

I know I know. But I need to get some ideas out of my system.

The considerably larger loft hatch is already in, so I can actually get bikes out of the graveyard now. I think the new window might be in by now too, not been back on site to check. I am acutely aware of the possibility for design clangers (forgot to check if new loft ladder clears the new bath...), but when we sell they can be someone else's problem.

Couldn't agree more. Some of the places I've viewed have what I wouldn't want in a kitchen what so ever yet you're compelled to pay more for.

I'm torn whether to go cheaper but get a renovation place.

forgot to check if new loft ladder clears the new bath...

Not something that's gonna be obvious when viewing though!

EWS1 Update:
No chance of selling my flat now. Guidance was changed yesterday to bring all buildings with any type of EWS into scope.

Here is my prediction: Homeowners in blocks of flats are canaries in the coal mine for what is about to happen. Since about the 1980s buildings have been constructed as concrete and steel structures skinned with all sorts of materials and insulated between skin and structure. Fire regs have been woefully inadequate and the insulation underneath all those skins is not going to pass the combustibility tests of the post-Grenfell era especially when you consider that building materials have often been substituted by profit incentivised home builders, for similar materials that are cheaper than those spec'd by the Architects. Few records have been kept of these so invasive examinations will need to be conducted at which point 10's of thousands of buildings will be condemned to nil valuations, making them unmortgageable.

This will start in blocks of flats and quickly spread to commercial buildings causing a huge property crisis. It is of the governments making having rushed through legislation post-Grenfell with little understanding of the process for building regs and the amount of bad-buildings in 'the system'.

The cost for reparation will need to be borne by one of 3 groups; the freeholders, the leaseholders or the government. The freeholders are likely to be slippery and if necessary will become insolvent washing their hands of the responsibility, the leaseholders will bear the cost through insurance premiums but the government will likely have to foot the 10's of £B's necessary to make the repairs.

what a shit show, soz

renting out is the only option you have left then?

renting out is the only option

Not likely as mortgage valuers will ask for the ews1 form before signing off on the valuation. No form no BTL mortgage.

This is the situation I'm in. In a housing Assoc block of flats that we staircased up to 100% on from shared ownership. We can't sell, can't remortgage and have to pay a huge amount of interest now our initial fixed rate deal has expired.

Edit: I'm hoping that a Tory government will resort to their self imposed stereotype of being the party of home ownership to sort this out but with this shower of abject cunts led by morons I won't be holding my breath as I slowly slide into insolvency.

place I'm trying to buy basically doesn't have a kitchen (it was about to be renovated by current owners). Very appealing that there isn't much to rip out, and what is there is old and knackered so doesn't feel wasteful. In some ways we're probably subconsciously paying more for such a sorry state of a kitchen.

The brochure had some guff on about being able to put your own stamp on it - but in a way it's true.

fuck sake. really sorry to hear that

not sure if it's still the case, but when my folks lived in Germany, your kitchen moved with you...

it is often still the case indeed..

Immediate thoughts.

Injuries / deaths by residential fires. Number historically declines over time because net, everything has become on average safer.

So I think this is primarily an insurance problem. I think that only in extreme cases will remedial works be required.

I suspect this is something the Tories could resolve. It's going to take time though.

@aggi @Howard @Bobbo Thanks for the advice.

I'm probably Penny pinching too much. I've just bought a new cheap standalone as the old one wasn't reliable and the grill didn't work. I was thinking of reusing it.

If I'm putting in a new kitchen then the extra of an inbuilt hob and oven won't put that much more on the price I guess.

The current kitchen looks like this so really needs replacing. Please excuse the homebrew kit...

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There's also very little bandwidth given Covid and Brexit, and making sure that we have enough food in 2021 is going to be a huge challenge for Q4 2020.

I think the cladding/flat situation is going to need a Rashford style intervention to move it up the priority list, but unless and until that happens it's likely to be parked squarely on leaseholders to resolve.

So I think this is primarily an insurance problem.

Yeah, I agree.

The number of genuinely comparable to Grenfell buildings is not huge, but significant. These will need to be addressed through remedial works. The rest will eventually be sorted out through insurer / regulator negotiations.

Is that a huge red sex toy??

Yes.

Yes it is.

I'm confused on the EWS1 stuff now, is every single multi occupant block included? Just those with cladding? Just over the height? Doesn't seem to be alot of solid information around.