Owning your own home

Any recommendations for Conveyancers/sollicitors for selling? When we bought we just used the solicitor recommended by the estate agents and they were actually really good but rather have some real world opinions this time round.

I'd also be very grateful for any recommendations for surveyors in SE London / Lewisham way - please do PM if not comfortable adding to the thread... thank you very much!

You may remember me writing about the buyers of our house demanding we move out ASAP so they could take ownership and start renovating.

I went back a few weeks ago to pick up some things off a neighbour and it looked like nothing had been done.

Then I got a call this evening from our old next door neighbour and it's now being squatted.

Perhaps they should have let us stay a bit longer after all.

Sweet sweet karma.

Apparently someone has broken in and then rented it out to people who were unaware that it wasn't legit. Bit shit for them because they're the ones who will lose out from it.

And for my former neighbours, who've been dragged into it too.

But it seems like quite a distant problem from my sunny Oxfordshire garden (and in my asbestos-riddled non-functioning leaky bathroom it seems like a secondary problem).

LOL

We are currently using Deborah Stanley at http://www.janetsinden.co.uk and find her to be excellent.
She is expert, thorough, quick and diligent.

She isn't driving force though, so she isn't the person for you if you need to bang tables and rattle cages to move things along

Not sure if this is the correct place to post this but, I’m going to anyway.
Mildly disturbing content warning for the squeamish amongst us.

Noticed a smell from under the floor over the past 24/48hrs.
We have the low budget version of underfloor heating- sunk radiators, which mainly serve as heating through the pipes that run to them.
Couldn’t see anything, cleaned out the space that I could, and then chucked in an endoscopic camera to go for a hunt.
Found a dead frog.
Pulled it out with a vacuum step down build out of cardboard tubes.
Now just trying to clear the fucking god-awful smell.
Kinda a pretty skeleton though.

You’d think the dog would’ve noticed first, right?!
The joys of home-ownership never end.

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Anyone got an EICR? How much was it? Bit annoying that in 13 years the consumer unit/fuse box thingie apparently needs upgrading. I'm sure my parent's house in Oz had the same fuse box for 50 years.

"To carry out an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR) on all of the electrical circuits in your flat and contained in the two fuse boxes.

This Report is a minimum of six pages on ECA forms and will detail all of your circuits, the continuity and insulation resistance of conductors, your protective devices and their condition with regards to compliance with the latest 18th Edition of BS7671, The IET Requirements for Electrical Installations.

We have a set scale of charges for this work of £80 per consumer unit and £70 per circuit plus vat. It is thought that you have seven circuits so this will cost 7 times 70 + 80 = £580 plus vat.

You may like to consider replacing the old fuse boxes with an up to date ten way, fire rated, high integrity, dual RCD consumer unit as your existing one was installed on the 6th of October 2010.
I have found the Installation Certificate. Unfortunately, this certificate states that the earthing system is reliant on the steel conduits and tested ineffective on the night storage heater, most lighting points and switches and some sockets. This can be improved with new connections to the steel conduit system or rewired with a separate earth conductor.

We could upgrade the electrical protection for the two circuits that used to feed the off peak supplies.

These are the underfloor heating in the lounge and the storage heater spur in the bedroom.
These two circuits will be rerouted to the existing consumer unit and protected with two new RCBOs, these are combined circuit breaker and residual current device.

Last time was £200 on a one bedroom house with no complicated shit.

We just bought a thatched house, and getting one was a condition of our insurance. We paid £40 per circuit (in Suffolk though, not London).

The real cost though was putting everything right :| Annoyingly, I'd missed that the previous owners didn't have one for the garage/shed.

The report is assessed against the latest regulations, which changed significantly in 2018 so we have lots of stuff to do. New consumer unit like you, and they discovered that the outbuildings hadn't been touched for a long time so need completely rewiring so we're about 5k down!

The EICR should come with a graded set of recommendations, from C1 (the most serious) through C3. Really, I think you only need to address C1 and C2, C3 are more a 'if we were installing this now we'd do it this way', but it's not actually dangerous.

Thanks both. Sounds like fun. :(

We only have a simple 1BR so it shouldn't be crazy but it seemed that 70 quid per circuit for some testing was a bit high (obviously with me not having a clue of what they actually do).

Why do you need it? Are you selling or are you concerned about it’s safety? Or something else?

It won’t be up to the latest standard but that doesn’t mean it needs replacing.

That report sounds like they’ve identified some minor issues but personally (IANAE) unless I was worried about safety for some specific reason I would ignore it.

I think there are EICRs and EICRs - the quick type landlords do just take a sample of sockets/switches, and the full one you might want for peace of mind in a newly purchased old house.

As someone said above, it’s the replacing things that gets £££.

Full test of 3 bed house in the sticks: £300+VAT (I paid)
£360+VAT (second quote)
See attached for a third price list I was given, I rejected on the basis it would be a spot check not a full check.

Big s

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Why do you need it?

https://blog.openrent.co.uk/eicr-rules-for-rental-property/

You're evolving into your final slumlord form?

Not yet. But planning ahead.

I looked at one before, didn't bother initially as some of the issues were going to be a ballache to fix. In particularly the new requirements for earthing and how disruptive that would be with new cables needing to be put in.

Sounds like it's going to be a bit like MOTs... you can get a proper one or you can take it to "Dave" who just fills the form out and sends you on your way.

I can only speak to our electrician, who is a mate of a mate, but it was very thorough. It took him a day and a half to go through everything, so although the cost was quite high it seemed reasonable in terms of the hours he put in.

Ok, maybe it is reasonable. I figured they're just sticking a gauge on the end of the circuit and writing a number down. :) I also want to get a wall heater or two installed so there could be a few grand 'at stake' here and I'd obviously rather spend that on bikes/travel. :D

Aha! Well what kind of landlord do you want to be? One who can point to a form and says “I complied with the law” when their tenant dies in a fire, or one whose tenant doesn’t die in a fire.

If I were a landlord I would want to work on the basis that all people are idiots and that includes my tenants and it would therefore need to be as safe as poss.

All I can say is I've lived in a country that allows power sockets in the bathrooms and I'm still here - this is how things should be. This country doesn't, so I have to assume I'm working with much lower levels of intelligence here and as such I'd prefer whichever moron ends up here to not burn my place down. Their life is secondary - consider it Darwinism. :D

Slum Lord (to the tune of Park Life)

I've come to the view that it is partly an improvement, and partly a scheme to keep the professional bodies going. The electrician said they were now being made to install surge protectors, which are a one-time thing, and they've never been called out to replace them so the odds of a surge must be pretty minimal.

The thing that wound me up was reading that the fire service convinced the government to force consumer units to be made of metal rather than plastic because there had been too many fires where it hadn't been contained - and consumer units tend to be by the stairs/on a means of escape. The industry then moaned that they had a huge stock of plastic units and got an extension to use them up - which now means when people get the NICEIC done for renting or whatever they get made to install a metal one.

BTW, one tip for saving money is that you may not have to have the test done by a NIC registered electrician-there are other bodies (like NAPIT) which are cheaper to join so the tests end up being a bit cheaper, but are equivalent.

I once went out to observe a callout for a Whirlpool technician to look at someone's washing machine. The chap had it in the bathroom, he had cut off the plug and spliced it into the mains, had literally just twisted the wires together and covered it in electrical tape. Needless to say the whirlpool tech refused to touch it and advised him to fit it somewhere correctly.

How to give a british electrician a heart attack:

It's funny how people malfunction when they see I have a washing machine in the bathroom
(not with twisted wires)