Owning your own home

Same, look at those floors!

There's definitely some damp where the saggy wallpaper is but you can see the potential.

There have been plenty of recommendations for sash restoration in here - I'd try that over a UPVC replacement.

This is my parents one - needs stripping back and re varnish / oiling where condensation has affected the wood. Bit of a ball ache but doable. Wouldn’t replace unless it’s falling to bits.

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At a glance, your parents one is in better nick.

Looking at your photo (zoom, enhance) the damage looks like internal condensation like the above, just a lot more of it, at a later stage. Looks like there's some black mould or similar below the velux and just above the rad, which (as I understand it) is a sign of internal condensation damp rather than external penetrating. Willing to bet they've had a wet atmosphere inside that they haven't tried to control through ventilation. Or a (stuck record) dehumidifier.

Maybe.

Intense M1 casually hanging around.

Actually, maybe it's a Mountain Cycle San Andreas.

Brilliant, just as I'm thinking of selling my flat a Section 20 notice for £16K drops through the letterbox.

Unfortunate timing. Assume there's no sinking fund?

Two strategies -

1. Be up front about at after an offer is submitted. You'll probably pay some, if not most of it. Or you could try refusing to negotiate, depending on the quality of the offer vs. asking and how much interest you are getting. If there are three other buyers in the queue then you can be demanding, if you have one interested party then less so, obvs.

2. Wait until buyers' solicitors find out about it, feign ignorance, refuse to negotiate. Depending on how much the buyer wants the place, you might dodge some or all of it, but you'd be a bit of a cunt.

I paid about a grand for a good, hardwood, double glazed sash replacement but it was probably a bigger window than that and included some other remedial work.

As others have said, that's better nick than anticipated for a fixer upper.

^when this happened on the last flat I sold, I split the Section 20 Amount 50/50 with the new buyer. It was the very first thing the buyers solicitor asked and then questioned.

Thanks for sharing those details. Photos don't show some of the massive holes left in walls and completely loose floorboards left by 4 teenage/uni aged sons. Positives mean we already know which walls are structural without booting them through ourselves!

I'm going to say no. I can barely look at the thing.

hmm ok

Once you have an offer accepted I would be quite clear with buyers. Keep in mind when you accept an offer that you may have to pay the amount and you are comfortable with that. I would avoid to hide it from buyers because if found during searches it may cause sale to fell through, not because of the amount - an agreement can always be found- but because of a lack of trust

I want something that heats and cools rather than having two separate things

There are movable active cooling devices* that will do this, but they are fairly large and loud when cooling. They do actually work though, and cost a similar amount to the spendy Dyson fan.

* advertised as portable air con.

We told our buyers of all the details of major works plans that we knew about once they'd made the offer and made the estate agents make sure they fully understood what this means before we would accept an offer

The big aircon unit I have heats and cools far better than a Dyson fan for about the same price. It is also pretty big and pretty noisy and uses a fair bit of energy (although obviously you get out what you put in to a certain extent).

I believe in that case the one that is still fixed will incur the exit charge which is usually a %.

Please not the "air con" debate again.

I hope you mean the type with a hose. If it doesn't have a connection to the outside world it can't cool down anything, due to pesky laws of thermodynamics.

The better ones can run in reverse and do heating too by cooling down the rest of the universe.

Sorry to let you down but I'm saving you a fortune here. It's really not very good at all. And it's also not silent.

I hope you mean the type with a hose.

@tbc is on the phone and he's telling me not to go in to it

It's Hackney homes so no sinking fund and the added factor of not fully trusting that due process has been followed. They paid 20k to a contractor to fix a leaking landing that now becomes a massive paddling pool whenever it rains.

I definitely won't be hiding it from any potential buyers but a 50/50 split would be a lot easier to take.

Interesting, so you said, we will accept your offer X, as long as you accept now that you will have to pay for this section 20 estimated at Y?

No I appreciate it - rather have you tell me that spaff £500 on one

ours was slightly different, ex-la southwark council leasehold so ours is that the block is part of a redevelopment/improvement scheme booked in for 2023-2026, but with no actual costs fixed (so no section 20 right now, but it would come up during the legal process anyway) so we just said we only wanted to accept offers where the buyers understood that this was coming and it would be on them