Owning your own home

If I drove a car into your bedroom and smashed it to pieces, you'd go and speak to your insurer?

I mean, I guess that's a thing, but I'm going to start with the cunts upstairs that caused the damage first.

Sounds like you're doing it backwards. The last time someone flooded our place we said "you flooded our place, pay to fix it". Why would I fuck my own insurance because of someone else?

British fucking "sensitivities" is why insurance companies are so rich.

If you can convince upstairs to fix it without going through your insurer there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not guaranteed. You'd have to rely on your powers of persuasion, intimidation, or your upstairs neighbours ignorance of the law and willingness to pay AND to do it to a proper standard. If those things are a possibility it's worth a bash.

However I've been in this situation multiple times and the only thing I've found that works consistently is going via your insurer so they can contact your neighbour and take care of the problem. Either your neighbour has insurance in which case the companies will know what to do, or your neighbour doesn't in which case your insurance company can chase them through the courts for remedy. Either way the problem isn't yours anymore, and that's ultimately what you pay for with insurance.

Fwiw when I did this, I didn't have to pay an increased premium. Suspect this might happen to people with no claims discounts, who then make a claim, but I think that's about it.

Less to do with British sensitivities and more to do with how it's actually supposed to be done I think.

With building damage the other party is liable if they are negligent but otherwise not.

There was a tail in the press a few years ago about a little old lady without insurance. Her neighbours chimney fell down through her roof. She couldn't afford to fix her roof and next door were not liable.

Ok, thanks all. Guess I'm just sick of dealing with insurance companies - after the crash, trying to get money back from travel insurance and health insurance was like blood from a stone for months. It's more stressful than the feckin' accident!

Is it negligent to have unplugged a washing machine and left it to leak through my ceiling? Or is that somehow my problem and now up to me to resolve via insurance? I guess the legal definition of this is why you involve insurance.

It would be a terrible shame if their empty flat was broken into and squatted by foxes with gastro though..

Good luck with sorting.
Reminds me of our friends who came back one day to find the entire ceiling collapsed in the lounge after washing machine above had been pumping water all day .
They could actually see up to the flat above .

Doesn’t really answer the question or what you wrote.

Is the upstairs a flat, is it your house if it’s your house did someone do work recently?

We're about to do our kitchen. We were originally going to replace the floor at the same time, but for the sake of costs might just live with the tiles that are currently in there. The kitchen is already on a concrete / level floor so should not need work under the tiles.

Does anyone know if it would possible to replace the tiles at a later date (in a few years perhaps) if the units are already there? Appreciate that it's likely harder and more expensive than doing it now, but for the sake of costs this year is it still a viable job to do?

Yeah, I think the tenants upstairs left, unplugged a washing machine but didn't turn the tap off properly or something and water has been dripping and has now entered our flat from the roof, into our recently redone kitchen cupboard. ie. it's not our fault, someone else has damaged our property.

Wowsers. Lucky we were here and hadn't disappeared for xmas travel or something.

Underneath the existing units are there tiles? Or is it just the subfloor (concrete).

You should be able to build the units on top of the subfloor and then have the plinth hide the unfinished floor, the only thing to consider is the height difference between current tiles and future floor covering (which might affect how short you trim your plinth and the height you set your units)

Thanks, the units are currently on the subfloor. Guess that means that there's be no excavation of the floor under the units needed when we came to change, sounds promising.

Landlord should have insurance so you should be able to claim through that but you'll probs still have to go through your insurance for them to claim theres. Id get onto the letting agent.

The missus has been talking to the agency that manages the flats.

We're currently on a tracker mortgage (base rate +0.87%) as when our last deal expired last year, the talk was all of successive rate cuts in 2o24.

That's not really happened, and we nearly switched to a five year fixed on 3.89% recently.

That deal no longer exists, and the best rate with our current provider is now 4.09%.

Anyone else who has renewed or switched lately - did you stick or twist?

4.09% is still less than we're paying now, and the idea would be to keep paying what we're paying now so there was an overpayment every month.

Still bitter about Truss and Kwarteng - we were on 0.97% on our last deal.

We had a wood floor installed around our existing kitchen. Trimming the plinth neatly is the main drawback, and it would mean cutting tiles or planning tiles to butt up against those places where the kitchen meets the floor. There is also a risk of damage to cabinets. Our guys were careful and we knew our existing kitchen wouldn't be perfect.

If you've got tiles then I wonder if there is a way to remove the current tiles where your new kitchen will meet the floor and install a temporary/semi-perm spacer. That way you minimise damage to the cabinets touching the floor, and give flexibility for tile size/layout etc. so it visually can flow under the cabinets.

Maybe also ask in the diy thread. Or would @Airhead have any ideas?

All that said tilers are used to working around objects. So doing it later is by no means insurmountable.

Thanks for the reply - I think we'll bite the bullet, but only refloor the part of the kitchen where the units are. The rest of the room is open plan / living room, so would have been different flooring anyway.

Rather than do the whole lot (42sq metres) well just do the kitchen bit (c.15 sq metres). That seems to be the optimum way to approach without too much regret work later on.

Sounds like a plan. I'd probably try not to go too niche on the tiles incase you want to partially match them down the line.

Given the relative low cost of tiling it makes sense to knock it out now. You could always look at doing it yourself to reduce costs. If you're employed, then there are a lot of bugs this time of year.

and we nearly switched to a five year fixed on 3.89% recently.

That deal no longer exists, and the best rate with our current provider is now 4.09%.

Anyone else who has renewed or switched lately - did you stick or twist?

I feel your pain. We just went from 5 years at 1.95% to 2 years at 5.08%!

Then again, we went for an offset deal which is always a bit higher as we have a bunch of savings. As a result we've almost completely offset the mortgage meaning we're paying next to no interest. It's like paying the mortgage off, but with the flexibility to either:

• pay no interest
  
• spend the money and pay 5% interest (basically it's like having an instant loan we can take out any time at a guaranteed rate)
  
• move cash to somewhere that pays more interest than the mortgage. Other than picking a lucky investment I think the only option right now would be a regular savings account, but if interest rates rocket we have the option I guess.
  
  

Admittedly, this was a very situation-specific option but it buys us time to build up savings ready to either pay it off, move or get a kitchen worthy of the golf club thread.

Another specific situation where we both fixed but with a product that had a 1% redemption penalty instead of 5% both deals were just over 4% one of the mortgages was moving from 1.4% but the LTV and loan were not massive so didn’t really jump that much as it’s a mature loan and the repayments have been less interest and more capital.
Due to selling one property and halving the mortgage on another with the proceeds, we assumed it would be 2 tracker deals to enable this but it was actually cheaper to fix both and pay the 1% redemption fees, once the cheaper product fees and interest were taken into account it offset the 1%.
This only works as the mortgages are not huge.
Hopefully by the time of the sale next year and 2 becomes 1 rates may have hopefully dropped a little but now we will look for a lower redemption fee as this can catch you out with changes in home plans and is often not something you think about when taking the mortgage out.

Thanks both. We've had savings since selling last year but we've just started spending it on our extension so no more.

The next Bank of England decision is on 6th Feb so I suppose there's a chance that mortgage rates could go down again in anticipation of that. But no one seems to have a clue what the medium to long term outlook is, and all predictions over the last two years seem to have been overly optimistic, so it might be best just to find a deal we're able to pay with overpayments and then just get on with it.

I imagine rates could drop a smidge in Feb since they decided to hold them steady this time, but it's not guaranteed and it probably won't be a hugely significant change. I've given up trying to play the market too much although I did accept a deal several months before our deal came to an end just in case rates came down, which they did and so we switched to that lower rate. Cautionary tale for anyone who does that - check what you're allowed to switch to as ours only let you move to a deal with identical terms save for the rate.

I need to get a new EPC cert before flat goes on the market.
I guess there’s bigger agencies and they send a local bod round to do it?
any recommendations or one man/woman bands in SE London.

I don’t want to fall foul of the regs but will want to tell them that once the junk is removed from the loft the unused rolls up there will be rolled out and it’s 270mm all over, or are they sticklers for the rules?

If you have an EPC from within 10 years you can use that. That's what I did in 2021 even though it was completely inaccurate by that point.