Owning your own home

You’d defo have to dig out the existing slab.

hardcore
new slab
150mm+ PIR
UFH pipes
~60mm screed

Cutting into an existing slab would be a waste of time unfortunately. We’ve gone for UFH in the new extension slab and rads in the existing house (that has an uninsulated concrete slab that I’m not digging up).

All this talk of mortgage price hikes, solicitor delays and unforeseen costs have given me nostalgia and we've decided to move out of London, to somewhere where salaries don't have a regional weighting but house prices are about the same as London.

Let the good times begin!

I had thought that oil (intermittently delivered by truck) was traditionally the cheapest solution to this? Obviously not future-proofed or particularly green.

Yup, we have oil as does the rest of the village. You have to order 500l min at a time and they turn up a few days later with a truck with a massive hose. There is a trial to move to HVO which is vegetable oil based and is pretty much a drop in replacement.

you have decided to move to Frome, Somerset?

How has the price moved this year versus gas / electricity?

A colleague of mine had a near-full tank pinched from his country place… ouch!

No, but following in similarly posh footsteps to Oxford.

Kept my eye out for jobs in Stroud for a few years but nothing seems to come up there. We've lots of family in Oxford and it's a lot closer to my parents in the north west so it's probably the right thing to do.

Frome is now locally known as little London!

It's quite variable and always has been. When we first moved in Oct 2021 it was around 60-70p litre. After Ukraine war started it went up to 1.50 briefly and was around £1 for quite a while. Currently around 90p
During COVID when it was massively over produced it dropped to 20p...

https://www.boilerjuice.com/heating-oil-prices/

I guess it’s luck of the draw if you happen to need to fill up at a particularly expensive time. And no benefit from the gov’t unit price cap I guess

Nope. If you have a sufficiently large tank you can time it to some degree and fill it up in summer when it's normally cheaper, but if you are about to run out and need it urgently you will pay a 10-15p litre premium too.
Its just something that you need to get into the habit of checking reasonably regularly or you can get devices that go in the tank and let you know how much is left remotely.

Govt were going to give a £200 payment to domestic oil users but never materialised. Buying oil can be a bit like renewing car insurance... Phoning around saying its cheaper elsewhere.....

.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/122109026#/?channel=RES_BUY

Stay in E12 and upgrade or er downgrade actually by the looks of it.

Hope the viessman warranty’s are better than they are on boilers. They will do anything to get out of fixing one that breaks down.

Unbelievable pricing now - I would have raised my eyebrows if that was £1.5m fully refurbished and in good nick, but that much in that state...

I’m sure that’s been posted before. Jesus Christ it’s bad and a money pit wouldn’t even cover it

I can smell those photos, the house is fucking rotten.

I wonder if that valuation is insisted upon by the vendors who think it only needs a lick of paint, or priced for developers who could convert it into 4-6 flats (even then profit feels like it would be low).

I suppose it’s priced to sell to someone who thinks it only needs a lick of paint. Or is 20 years out if date on what it costs to gut and refurb.

I've not kept up with prices in Aldersbrook (mainly it's too far from Gails, but also I don't have over a million to spend on a house).

But if a house of that size is in good nick is £2m, then you'd be laughing if you had the time and money to do that up nicely.

But if a house like that in Aldersbrook is £1.75m to £2m, Oxford suddenly seems much more reasonable.

But if a house of that size is in good nick is £2m, then you'd be laughing if you had the time and money to do that up nicely.

Good luck making a profit on buying for £1.5m (plus ~£91k stamp duty). And then selling for £2m.

£400k does not buy you a lot of time/materials at the moment and that place leads a LOT of work. Breaking even is a lot of work for nothing.

You'd need to push the price down to (at a guess) ~£1.3m to have a chance of making any kind of a profit.

We're considering this when we do our kitchen. How easy is it finding builders to cut the channels? Does it add much floor height (from the level of the concrete, foe example). Cheers!

[Edit] just read further and saw that you haven't done this. :(

Any recommendations/experience on costs for an electrician in London?

We're building a garden office and to set it up with power they're talking £2.5k total (including running armoured cable down the garden). Seems a lot to me and the estimate doesn't help as there aren't numbers on each item, but wondered if I was missing something. What should an electrician day rate be?

Seems high, I'm not in London (Bedfordshire) but had essentially the same job done in October, and it cost £595 total. Took about two days.

I think if you're running the cable more than a certain distance then it may need to be properly buried (600mm deep?) which might add to the cost - we didn't need that.

Buried armoured cable? How far is the run?
I was charged £300 a day to finish my house rewire. Expensive maybe, but at least they to did a full day at that price.
If you are having it on a separate breaker, they'll also need to run cable from the consumer unit to a suitable point to exit house.