Owning your own home

Our fucking roof is leaking now. Think we've bought a money pit.

The house next door to ours has gone on sales for 60% more than we bought ours for in Jan 13 though so that's some consolation.

It won't go for that, but still a nice thought.

My roof is leaking too. I need a new one :-(

But I thought I would get a price for replacing the gutters and soffits at the same time. £3000+VAT. How do they get a price like this? Do all builders live like Pharaohs?

3000 divided by the two people who will be working
1,500 / 4 days = £375 per day
out of that £375 per days they need to hire scaffolding
pay for the lead
tiles
cement
sand
pay for their van and their diesel
they probably have a mortgage and a family so i guess they'd need to put some aside for food and holidays, clothes for when the kids go to school etc
they probably don't know when they're next job is coming along

3k is a decent spec Cannondale or a Pinarello for comparison

the roof should last you 30 years so spread out you are paying £300 a year to keep the rainwater off your stereo equipment

I think £3000 was just for the gutters. £3k for a whole new roof would be good!

They might have decided they don't really want the job, or that it's a particularly tricky or fiddly one so whacked the quote up to put you off. Get a couple more quotes and you'll have a better idea of a fair price.

roofs leak. the longer you wait to get it fixed, the more it'll end up costing you. There's plenty of recommended roofers on here.

Shouldn't need scaffolding for gutters/soffits I wouldn't have thought.

They won't be on the roof itself for any period of time.

Scaffolding is ridiculously expensive to have put up and hire.

This. Our survey flagged a few bits and we ignored them. Now looking at £1,800.

we made the same mistake - although the survey neglected to point out that our roof was fucked, largely due to the fact we opted for the vanilla flavoured survey.

moral of the story - pay for the full rub & a tug with a happy ending survey, you'll kick yourself if you don't.

1800 notes sounds pretty reasonable.

I've just looked at prices of gaffs round where I used to live in Hammersmith.

How depressing.

Is it this thread or the other thread when you want to find out who the LFGSS approved plumbers etc are?

I would like someone to give me a cost for moving radiators / replacing radiators.

there's another thread?

Yes. £3000 just for the gutters. No need to pay for scaffolding since it will already be in place. 2nd quote for the gutters, again when replacing roof, was £2100, but they wanted £10,000 for roof instead of £7,000.

@sacredhart did ours, would recommend...

Am I the only one thinking something really cool can be done with this space for living?

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/03/narrow-terrace-house-north-london

okay then ..

Someone already did a great job on a house 1ft thinner in Shepherds Bush:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233444/Thin-house-fat-wallet-Property-6ft-wide-sale-550-000.html

Sorry for the DM link but it has the most pictures.

Anyone had any recent luck with any roofers? I'm looking to get some additional quotes for gutter clearing plus possibly some minor repairs.

I've UTFSF, and have tried LF Roofing as recommended here.

FFS, the tinker that I hired to clear the gutters for £65 spent all of twenty minutes from time of arrival to time of departure. Not bad for a cash job.

I think I possibly have a good roofer on the way, will report back with details.

Also have a very professional (and cheap) central heating engineer who I will post details for, once I've finished using them.

maybe they didn't need doing

invest the £65 in a ladder ... buy a man a fish and he'll eat for a day etc.

roof ladders cost a shit load more than £65, even hiring one ain't that cheap and then there's delivery costs. also, last time i went up two stories on a ladder i nearly shat myself.

65 notes is pretty reasonable, and now you have nice clean gutters.

Anyone got a good plumber in east london? Our soil pipe/stack seems to be blocked, so when you shower the water backs up enough to go up the boilers condensate drain pipe and shut it down (as well as dripping all over the boiler cupboard). The soil stack appears to be concreted in and there's no cover anywhere that I can find!

Got my contract through to sign. The solicitors got my name correct at the top of the page but then wrong at the bottom. Not even just a spelling mistake, a whole other name. They also had down double the deposit value that our mortgage is based on (£20,500 instead of £10,250). Fired off a snippy email, got a corrected version back straight away with the right name but they'd just changed the 2 to a 1 on the deposit value. I have sent another email with a link to some further education sites for adult numeracy.

Makes me wonder what other little fuck ups there might be.

Plenty. Check all the the things.

I think sacredheart might be the forum plumber

Sacredhart is the LFGSS plumber in residence. Think he's more north than east but might be able to help you out.

Edit - too damn slow

I didn't know his whereabouts though