Owning your own home

Finally got the keys to our new house, no thanks to Macron’s new lockdown.

It needs a lot more work than I remember!

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some sort of town/village with bare minimum cafe, pub, off license within walking distance.

I know just the place, its quaint.
Catford.

Looks great! La France Profonde?

Woah! Looks awesome. Echoed the house renovations. Went around my new place today just to drop off garden bits and left with a huge list.

Still one thing at a time!!

The 'gram doesn't lie..!

Envious of all these new houses but congrats!

Ours should be going on the market this week - excellent timing huh.

I have questions as a noob who has never sold somewhere before:

• Do we need to get paperwork to prove the boiler has been serviced and/or a gas safety certificate? The last paperwork we have is from March 2016 when the boiler was installed but it's thorough and includes building proof of building regs compliance. I did get a plumber to look at it recently when he was doing something else, he had a look and said it's golden but I have nothing on paper.
  
• I've got the same question about the electrics. Detailed paperwork from 2016, and the sticker on the (metal) consumer unit says it's next due to be inspected March 2021, but in reality it was looked at last year by a friendly spark when we had an RCD keep tripping because a few screws needed tightening.
  
• Last one is a bit embarrassing! We paid NHBC to do our building control stuff. I always presumed the dusty NHBC folder in the cellar had something in it - turns out not, apart from (minimal) evidence of three site visits. So we have no compliance certificate. Our architect arranged it and I just paid the invoice, so I think they had his name and address and I've also noticed that our house number is wrong on the invoice... Can I just call up NHBC and ask them to reissue the certificate?
  

1 - no. You might need the commissioning cert though. The one you have :) As per previous boring boiler chat, the warranty tends to hinge on it actually being serviced, so you might find a buyers surveyor stating that in their report and to not rely on it actually working.
2 - no.
3 - dunno, NHBC are pricks. Should be recorded with building control I would have thought, so it will come up in the property searches. That is, if they actually did the thing they were paid for.

Thanks. Current plan is ring NHBC in the morning, if no joy follow up with architect. They left the dusty, very partially completed folder behind in the cellar so that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

it will come up in the property searches

Or it would, if Hackney Council weren't unable to process local authority searches 'for the foreseeable future'. Just found this out. FFS.

We had to wait three months to buy our flat purely because Hackney took three months to supply the searches, now they're going to delay our sale too!

we were asked during enquiries for when boiler was last serviced and whether we had a service report, not a requirement though

Thanks. I think we can say that it was serviced in July and we received an oral service report?!

It's not a legal requirement and my solicitor pointed that out whenever my buyer asked.

I just stated that should they need I would have it serviced but it never went further than that.

Equally the electrics may be raised. Same as above not a legal requirement but they may ask it's checked.

Done the stairs. I'd give this DIY job a 3/10 for difficulty.

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The floors look great . What wood are your floorboards ? Pretty sure mine are pine and they dent easily .

Very tidy.

You could at least have hoovered them

Ran out of light

Looks great! Any unforeseen issues?

I didn't order enough stairs so I tried to bodge the top step, you can see it's got a hole in it. I'll finish it properly when the rest of the stuff arrives.

Other than that, it's honestly pretty easy.

That looks bloody gorgeous

Permanent move?? Or home away from home

Well done! Thought that'd be a lot bloody harder than 3/10

Why am I being @'d in the homeowner thread?

:D

I'd call it snow leaning to sleet, big globs of mushy ice splattered on my hotel windows during a heavy thunder storm.

Of course nothing settled on the ground.

Nice work. Given the age of your house in guessing it's a morticed stringer? (don't know the proper terminology) Does it go something like slot in a riser, slot in the tread below, bash it until it fits? Thinking about doing the same but possibly keeping some of the old risers and painting them.

They'll ask but on the electrics and boiler you can say no.

It'll look weird if you had recent work done (e.g. new boiler or consumer unit or something) but otherwise there's a pretty good chance you're not going to have that stuff.

Most expensive place in the Kenley development of mid-century modern places was £750k in 2017.

Zoopla estimated range for the place we're looking at is 665-812, presumably the 812 is for perfection.

The EA said that the place needed 100k spent to be spot on, and I don't disagree with her. I do disagree with Zoopla about a perfect place being ~800k though.

I'm tempted to offer 665 and see what they say, based on the amount of work the place needs to be nice. Is this a lunatic plan that can only go wrong?

It feels like you are having the discussion about the last £10k on price before you are sure you really want to live there?