Owning your own home

We had a mortgage approved pending all our documents checked out to what we had stated.

Halifax then pulled the mortgage and have refused to tell us why.

Is there any legal requirement for them to give a legitimate reason? Or even a courtesy to let us know what we fell down on?

There’s no legal obligation unfortunately.

You can speak with the financial ombudsman who can investigate on your behalf but this will likely not result in anything useful and almost certainly won’t affect the decision.

We just had one of these installed - our "vaillant advanced" installer still hadn't seen one before either and it subsequently broke in the space of a few weeks. to be fair, getting vaillant round to check and repair it was easy

Lemme guess. CO / all gas sensor - error code F55?

Apparently they’re much more complicated to commission and set up properly. FWIW an engineer eventually worked out that the flue fan power wasn’t high enough so the condensed water was running back into the boiler and tripping the sensor. TBF we do have a slightly convoluted flue run, but it took months for someone to work this out, all the other guys just changed various parts at random.

ooof, that sounds like a nightmare - thankfully for us it was just the temperature sensors somewhere had failed, or were reading incorrectly, so it thought it was chucking out higher temps and therefore modulated down so all we got was lukewarm water.

This may be unfair, but my experience of talking to a lot of plumbers/vaillant/viessman about different control systems and weather compensation etc., is that there isn't a lot of proper understanding of how they actually should work. Dread to think what will happen when the UK eventually starts installing heat pumps everywhere

You have a right (because of GDPR) to have solely automated decisions reviewed, as well as access to profiling data the bank has for you.

Can you imagine what this shit is going to be like once we are all on ground / air source heat pumps? Literally everything is going to be 'bleeding edge' at consumer scale, i.e. just doesn't fucking work.

My place is on the market. One of the people working at the instructed estate agents has made an offer... ha

Obviously a cheeky offer too

No conflict of interest there, then.

Can anyone recommend a decent painter & decorator? Ideally in East/North.

@cjr has someone, as does Tenderloin I think

I mean, who doesn't want a drawing room with a fine plaster ceiling made by French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/73053133#/

It's not quite in the location I want, doesn't have much of a garden and is obviously a complete money pit, but so tempted.....

That rooms madness but the building is really nice. Would almost take it over a two bed in east london.

Yeah, it could be absolutely beautiful. Love the tower room.

At the general room: thank you for the Banhams recommendation. Service was brilliant (although they took some chasing to pay them), and the product is worth the cost - they've made a door that I was nervous about feel incredible secure with really nice kit and a few helpful tips along the way - including a recommendation to dial back what I was asking for and save a bit.

i'm having my studio/study/wankhaven tarted up a bit which includes removing the old lighting fixtures and installing some spots as well as adding two extra wall 'leccy outputs.

will this void any previous electrical inspection certificates thereby necessitating getting another one?

Yeah, it could be absolutely beautiful. Love the tower room.

Love it, shame that there seems to be very little garden. Is it, in reality, in Weston-super-mare?

Inherited a Vaillant ecotech plus 837 when we moved in... 100% won’t be getting a vaillant to replace it, put it that way...

How often should one replace a combi gas boiler? I know it's not a fixed time, just to get a sense of it. I inherited mine with the house so it's at least 7 years old and probably quite a bit older.

When it's costing you £3-400 to repair it.

Hmm. I haven't had it serviced in a few years. Maybe I should. It mostly works though.

I replaced mine when the repair cost came to half the price of a new one. Expensive repair with no guarantee of long-term fix/stability or a new boiler with a 10yr guarantee made it an easy decision.

Have you had it regularly serviced? Have bills/fuel consumption increased recently relative to previous years?

The older ones aren't too fussy, it might just keep going on forever. The one we took out was > 20 years old, it was still running despite having been condemned at some point by someone.

Anyone had a house rewired recently?
4 bedrooms. Looking to know what it roughly costs.

In my old place the boiler was there for 11 years after I moved in, don't know how long before I moved in but a few years I reckon.

Had one repair in that time and still going strong when I moved out.