Owning your own home

Sad chuckle

per the lease will simply instruct someone to do the job he thinks it needs, and the bill to be sent to us (which is by far the most expensive option)

Not in all cases - you might be able to arrange a contractor yourself and convince the freeholder to use them, assuming it’s major works and needs an S20 process.

Comment about insurance was more about the rest of the building being fucked by water bypassing the ducked roof, rather than claiming on the insurance for the fucked roof itself which yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

We've not had one up the toilet, but they've come via the drains and dug their way into our wall cavities. Cat has had one in the kitchen, had movement in the loft and we had one in the kitchen cupboard last week :cry:

I'm going to get a one way valve installed, also thinking about bringing a kitchen renovation forward so that I can fully gut and ratproof the room. Nightmare.

We had squirrels in the loft. Chewed through a bunch of wires. There was a gap where a dormer met the rest of the roof that was covered from rain but if you could go up led straight in.

Ouch, my neighbour insisted he hadn't been hit by this latest rat invasion but he confirmed today that his underfloor heating has stopped working, only to find a rat had eaten through the wires.

Far be it from me to defend freeholders, but VB’s situation does show the value (!) of having a third party to administer leases and compel people to chip in their fair share of communal works. The threat of big legal bills and, ultimately, lease forfeiture might get your downstairs neighbours to reconsider their options.

They've barely had time to consider their options in the timeline of his posts.

To play devil's advocate. The freeholder has not done anything to check if the roof is sound or if any maintenance is necessary. Based on the reported damage/disrepair, one would assume that they have not even thought about the state of the roof for a long time.

one would assume that they have not even thought about the state of the roof for a long time

Yep, I think a fair assumption!

If I want people to critique my kitchen design, is this the thread for it or is DIY the better option?

Rights and easements are a common part of land registry titles.

In our Mews we have both rights over land not owned by us, in order to get into the mews in the first place, and we have easements which mean we have to grant access to the other garage and house owners/renters so they can access their properties.

It's not that straightforward sometimes, and a good solicitor can uncover some fun stuff.
We own the mews on a separate title and formed a company to do so in order that we could grant rights and parts of the property from the mews to our house title, to make any future sale easier. It turned out that some of those rights and easements were not written correctly and should have failed to pass down to subsequent owners, only nobody noticed. It also transpired that we had no legal right of access from our courtyard to a private road next to it, despite a gate having been there since the 1850s. A cheap indemnity policy was all that was required to secure that right in perpetuity, though I am not sure what it does if we need to claim.

All this stemmed from a huge property with many houses and stables being split up over many years into separate titles. Old houses can be fun.

Is it £40k+? If so, here

Interesting - thanks. Sounds like a decent solicitor would be able to ensure that things are on a firm legal footing.

I'm going to speak to the estate agent tomorrow to establish if other people have made offers before, and what happened to those.

About £4k...

3 Attachments

This week's four figure surprise.
Where the extension meets the house at the roof point is coming away.

1 Attachment

It never rains but it pours.

One thing I'd suggest on a practical note is to think hard about anything that you think could help facilitate or prevent your access being impinged upon, then getting that put in place before.

For e.g. (in France) my parents' place has a right of access over a 2m section of road belonging to the neighbours. In retaliation for a perceived slight they put up a gate which now makes it harder to enter (ironically leaving cars running outside their house for longer).

If my folks had put in a proper wall and decent gate before hand, it wouldn't prevent the neighbours from doing the same thing, but it would have been much harder politically to put a gate in front of their gate.

I'd also question why, in what looks like a straight forward scenario there you wouldn't ask the people with the access root to sell it before purchase.

I will ask them that, but they may not want to lose “their” lawn, or they might be very happy to trouser 5 grand for a path. IDK.

I reckon “access noted in the deeds” might be an easier sell than “sell me the end of your lawn”.

I feel for you, you've really had rotten luck with this house. Is there a solution that doesn't require rebuilding the extension?

What's this drawn in? I can share sketchup files of mine if you like.

Drawn in the Ikea kitchen planner, which isn't too bad (especially if you're using Ikea carcasses, as I plan to do). I started with a hand sketch approximately to scale, to get an idea of how it all might fit.

Shelves are indicative and will be custom, as will worktops.

The washing machine in the kitchen is possibly controiversial but it makes a lot of space in the adjacent cupboard which could be transformed into a pantry.

Sketchup files welcomed!

Christ.

Did your surveyor have a cane and dark glasses?

We had a similar thing when the plumbers came to put a boiler on a wall. Underneath 4 alternating of layers of tiles and plaster board you could move the wall with your hand.

Has made us think about a two story extension like the one upthread which most people hated but we quite like.

Would you consider putting the sink where the dining table currently is and creating a longer L shape along the wall where the cooker is? You could then have the dining table in the open space under the window. The current position of the table looks a bit claustrophobic to me.

This was one of my original ideas. Haven't taken it further as the sink, washing machine, and dishwasher are clustered in their current location because that's where they can connect to drainage. Moving things to the dining table recess means I'd have to re-run the drainage pipes to sufficient fall over a length of about 4m, which is possible, but would also have to turn 90 degrees sideways under the floor and then cut through a bunch of floor joists, which makes it a non-starter in a flat (there might be a way to achieve it technically, but it would become warrantable work (permits, signoff etc) and becomes something that I can't DIY.