Owning your own home

Sounds painful. Any reasons for it being so long?

Selling a shared ownership flat meant dealing with an incompetent housing association, compounded by various EWS related issues that ultimately meant the buyer had to start from scratch with a different lender. Then our solicitor seemed to get greedy with all the stamp duty holiday demand and took on more clients than they could handle effectively. And I think the same for the seller's solicitor. So enquiries were going unanswered for weeks or months, with no one chasing (apart from me). Light at the end of the tunnel now... I hope.

@hugo7 @bq those 3 look like that buy every other house has the same non-rendered front.
The road is interesting, some people have done the houses up and are lovely, some rented and run down and some just owned by people who don't maintain them. Doing some research, the landlord bought it in 2008, did fuck all to it (e.g. kitchen is same as the 2008 listing), let out 4 rooms making £££ each month and then has around 140k in capital appreciation since 2008.
This is nice and on the other side of the road
This is also nice, 470k 18 months ago allegedly
Finally this wasn't in best shape but was still way more than this one a while ago

@swedeee that is so cool

Just read my first survey. Estate agent emailed it over from the previous buyer who pulled out. No idea what to make of it.
Why does a boundary wall adjacent to a house wall create damp?

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Surveyors can potentially be liable for issues which 'should' have been evident in a survey but aren't, hence every survey being as much an exercise in behind covering than a accurate evaluation of the state of the house.

In theory, I suppose a boundary wall could at some point along it's length hold water and allow ingress to the walls through capillary action, or, should next doors walls have be damp, 'bridge' some of that that moisture over to your walls in a manner you can't control. In practice if the interior walls look fine, I personally wouldn't bat an eyelid at it.

@giles337 sweet cheers. Yeah heard that about behind covering being a key driver

When I sold my old place and bought my place there were maybe three documents that I had to physically print and sign.

The “wet ink” thing is so dumb. I’ve said this before but you can do multi billion pound m&a deals without “wet ink” signatures so I have no idea why it is still required in resi land. As well as faxes etc

Thank you for clarifying Mr Bezos.

Ugh. Missing the point.

Alignment of interests init.

No one with agency in the house buying process has any interest in making things easier or more efficient.

Cheers, did you hire one of those petrol powered soil twatters and just keep checking the was level along the sides?

What was the structural thing alluded to earlier?

I wouldn’t worry about half the things surveyors actually find, let alone things that can happen

No, I used a spade and boots to do the physical leveling. Then a few straight bits of wood with a big level to measure.

As I said it is a small/storage shed that I was relocating, so it would have been as much work to get a machine into the back as to do it by hand.

Probably also worth saying it went in an existing flower bed so digging was easier. Ymmv depending on location and size.

I don't have many pics as I was trying to fit it in at night and a couple of weekend nap times before my BiL came to stay who helped me move the shed.

My only other suggestions for a normal shed would be;
1) to allow for some extra round the edges for the rain run-off to fall onto as it will soak away better than grass and won't have dirty splash back.
2) have an extra "door matt" section at the front where the wear from foot traffic will be heaviest. Because it clicks together and can be easily cut you can do whatever shapes you want that would add to the cost of a concrete base.

@Howard There is a damp and timber report from the buyers who pulled out, and then a structural report which looks to have been commissioned by the landlord (different name, surveyor did a survey on it when the landlord bought it 13 years ago).

-roof needs work
-gutters need replacing
-not sure where the gutter links to at the front, maybe in to the foundations
-cracks in the rear rendering
-no 77 loft conversion protrudes through the party wall
-front wall distorted leaning 30mm to the right of the bay
-the bathroom (which is the downstairs extension) isn't ventilated right
-needs some air bricks (subfloor ventilation is inadequate)
-chimneys need maintenance, rain penetrates at the base
-wall fractures
-odd bits of damp
-was only like one socket in each room

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Few more pics. Highlights there just from having a quick re-read

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@Crispin_Glover cheers yeah good shout. I remember my dad negotiating a bit off his old house because the survey said it needed a new roof. New roof wasn't needed so that survey paid for itself

lmao wild fan position

Totally agree, but in defence of conveyancing solicitors, some of it is stuff they can't control, like the Land Registry demanding them. The LR generally being slow and archaic. For example: they have introduced some new forms (ID3 and ID5) so that people can verify ID for title deed purposes via video call, but they still have to be signed with a wet signature, which totally defeats the point!

That does seem odd - ours just send PDFs. Can't think of any legal reason why they'd need to do that.

I have a friend buying a shared ownership flat - she has had to use the housing association recommended (well, enforced) solicitors and they are utterly shit. So I can understand that plus EWS = no fun.

It does seem like a lot of solicitors have taken on more than they can chew but to be fair I don't think it's much fun being a conveyancing solicitor at the moment.
https://www.todaysconveyancer.co.uk/main-news/conveyancers-considering-leaving-the-profession-due-to-mental-health/

Mmm. Some chunky stuff there. The potential for the flooring and supports to be rotting / infested would worry me the most.

the flooring supports/joists in our whole bottom floor were rotten/wood worm riddled. we were removing the back of the house so that got rid of half the job in one fell swoop - replacing unsalvageable joists and treating the others cost about 1500/2000 I think. that's for a 1920s 3-bed terraced house so not a massive footprint - and we have easy access to the subfloor due to having a basement/underhouse