Owning your own home

If you do this all with party wall surveyors they put a lot of the petty bickering aside and sort out a more reasonable figure when it comes to damages. People always like to moan about their neighbours building work, it's a fact of life, if they're hard up the idea of getting a few grand to repaint their wall seems reasonable to them.

On the flip side builders are getting away with some liberties regarding the issues they're creating in surrounding properties and there's next to nothing you can do about it even with a party wall agreement.

https://twitter.com/deanvannguyen/status/898145633273556992

Sorry, can't help, our flat was already a freehold when we bought it, don't have any details on how/when it was all done.

Anyone know of any decent reliable, not overly pricey repairers of smeg cookers. Think the plug on my range cooker shorted, frying something internal as the oven no longer works, and clock is just black.
Ideally I'd like to try and repair if that cost is less than purchasing a new one..
I'm south london based..

I've used Domex before. They repair all sorts of appliances and were honest with me when they told me to bin my fridge freezer.

Buying flat with short lease, to be renewed as part of the sale, turns out the person who everyone thought was the freeholder wasn't properly registered 15 years ago when they bought it, the official title belongs to a company, which now no longer exits. FML.

What to do? Buy with a short lease (66 years) and hope it'll be resolved some time in the future? Hang around for an unknown amount of time until it's resolved? Sack it all off and buy a campervan?

You won't get a mortgage easily with a 66 year lease.

Tell the seller to come back to you once they've sorted it and in the meantime look for something else.

Barclays have agreed a mortgage based on the current lease - they don't lend on hypotheticals.

Sounds like that wants to be someone else's problem!

so who are the lessees paying their ground rent to- this unregistered freeholder?
what happens in the event of an unproven freehold?
how are they proposing to 'resolve' it?

just who is this masked man?

Offer them £100000 less until they've sorted it or it's campervan/houseboat time

Dammit man, I want answers, not more questions!

ask those questions and enlightenment will follow

Ground rent: I don't care as I haven't been paying it, interesting though.
Unproven freehold could result in an absentee landlord situation and we could buy the freehold, or it could end it famine and plagues upon the house.
Resolve, I don't know, no one seems to have any idea what they're doing.

According to this website, you're effectively putting yourself in a position where, if you can't find the freeholder, you're going to need to organise the other leaseholders to do a mandatory Full Enfranchisement (i.e. purchase the freehold).

That means you'll need 50% of the other leaseholders to join in to purchase the freehold, and it may mean you need to convince them to shell out many thousands of pounds depending on how long their leases are.

On the positive side Enfranchisement is probably worth doing anyway - it means you own the freehold, it adds thousands to the value of your property, and it means you can extend your lease for fuck all to 999 years. But it does mean you're dependent on other residents, who you've not met, and who might be colossal bellends.

The only other flat downstairs also came onto the market once we'd made an offer and has a lease of the same length... could be a goer actually. We'd just have to wait and wait. We loose our early repayment fee from the previous mortgage in three months (£7k) but apart from that and it being shitty waiting, it might be worth it.

Our conveyancer recommends not going near it until the title is resolved. Guess we're gonna start looking again and if it's worked out in the next two months we'll revisit the idea.

Why are banks so fucking shit? £20k arbitrary limit on online banking transfers. Go into branch and you can't transfer anything more than another arbitrary limit of £5K without ID. Can I do two smaller transfers? Can I fuck.

Now having to make successive transfers over the rest of the week to get all the cash to our solicitors so we can complete before the bank holiday weekend. In itself it's not too much faff but frustrating as it's delaying exchange.

Thought there was a separate service you have to do that costs a token amount but lets you use large amounts? CHAPS or whatever.

Yeah pretty sure this exists- the solicitor should know and have requested this really..

Yeah.

To get the account number I'd actually go in person to the solicitors office these days, too.

Le sigh

You can withdraw it in cash and take it to the solicitors

Or pay £23 for a Chaps payment

Asked builders for cedar batten fence. Come home from work and theres a load of rough pine batten. Sent email to builder just making sure that's not for the fence

You say "...cedar batten fence..."

Builder hears "....some kind of wooden fence..."

Lost count of how many times what seems like a clear instruction is lost / forgotten / ignored.