Owning your own home

I'd start looking for another surveyor TBH.

Yeah. You’ve been plenty patient. Give them a polite deadline of Tuesday to get you the report to you before you go elsewhere.

she said she thinks the report has been typed up, but not sure where it is

Let's hope they know who their PI Insurance is with :)

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Should I be asking the bigger question - did they actually do the survey?

Have you paid them? If not, I'd start teeing up another surveyor.

They are all fucking embarrassingly useless, mind

I’m guessing you’ve paid already, if not ill telling them to stick it. Holiday/flu.

Not really your problem, if you have paid as someone else said. Tell them that they have till Tuesday and if not you want a full refund and they can stick it

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@ExTra sorry to hear that. Hope you get the report soon but don’t expect too much. They are all quite copy and pasty

@Howard not all are horrible, we had a great local surveyor that seriously surpassed all expectations (and got recomended to friends, family and fellow Lffgs’ers)

Since our house went on the market, we've had 4-5 different marketing communications from estate agents essentially saying

"we've got loads of buyers ready. If your house hasn't sold yet, your agent must be shit."

I know this is news to no one, but estate agents really are knobs on the whole, aren't they.

We got one today written on behalf of the woman who told us she'd market it for £100k less than what we've been offered, telling us she can't believe anyone would market a property without a video tour.

We were told that we were being extra for expecting a weekly update from a local independent estate agent changing top £. Only after going full Karen they started getting stuff done promptly. They then went full friendly, gave us direct line to the office director, but still expected to be patted on the back for doing their job. Said director asked to be taken for a pint after deal was done 😂 he is still waiting

telling us she can't believe anyone would market a property without a video tour

Never have I ever bothered to watch a video tour for a property I've been interested in buying.

I like Vince because he is precisely everything these agents aren't. I.e he is a nice bloke and appears to actually have a moral compass sadly lacking elsewhere in the industry.

I just spent a fairly significant amount buying and then doing up my new house and I didn't bother with any of those surveys- in fact I only got a 300 quid verbal survey from a local surveyor just to make sure it wasn't going to fall down. As it turns out one of the bedroom ceilings did have asbestos in it so we just overboarded it.

My advice is you obviously need to do whatever makes you sleep easy at night but it's also very easy to start overthinking things and spending money you don't really need to be spending.

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I didn't actually, my builder of many years experience went into the bedroom and said that's got asbestos in it so we will just need to overborded and then skim it.

I expect the free building surveyor will do you no favours and you'll be "needing" a new roof

The testing kits on Amazon are easy/fast/cheap. We confirmed asbestos in two rooms for £2k removal (plus two new ceilings) and discovered the other rooms were ok (despite some advice otherwise).

I'm not sure about over-boarding/skimming... feels like an awful surprise for future owners?

Why worry about future owners, what happened if you stay in it for 50 years.

For the same reason you don't cut corners on electrics, or under spec joists. You want a safe environment for the lifetime of the building.

I'd rather my legacy wasn't asbestos exposure for the poor fuck trying to move a light fitting...

You raise a fair point. I live here, know it's there and won't disturb it

I intend to be carried out of this house in a long wooden box. If my plans change and I sold the house before that happened then I'd make it clear during the sales process that one ceiling historically contained an artex coating and shouldn't be disturbed. That would be the right thing to do.

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I think the danger depends on the exact thickness, etc, but yeah... ours was very thick (~3cm) and took two people 1.5 days to remove.

They liquified the ceilings, dropping them onto a plastic sheet before bagging it all up. They used an extractor and built an air lock surrounding each door.

The rooms were much cleaner after they'd finished(!) and I had complete faith in them... they said they covered most of the work in the south west (re-badged as multiple companies).

They also took some asbestos sheets away from around fireplaces, etc and provided a 'certificate' for the disposal of it all.

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