I left the last part on a little bit of a cliffhanger.
If you’ve not read them – you can find parts 1 and 2 here and here.
“ Being transparent about this part of the context setting series – I have condensed events and not totally stuck to the chronology – as, being frank a lot happened over a period of four years. However – all of the events that I describe took place and are factual. I have basically consolidated 48 months and 1000 pages of emails into a 2000 odd words of blog post.
Now, I know that you will all have heavily beating hearts and will have been thinking “how could you have left it there” …. I am just kidding, I know no one cared 😀 I actually write this crap for personal therapy!
For those of you who have read the About section of my site – you will know that I referenced that I came to a realisation that there was going to be some work needed on my little cottage that I was going to need to learn how to do – and it is in this part where I explain how that happened.
When I bought the Shire there was something wrong that was never disclosed to me. The issues weren’t picked up on my Survey – and the original owner didn’t disclose it on the legal paperwork and due to the limited time that I had to view the cottage I didn’t even notice.
This was the fact that the cottage next door, which is physically attached to mine had been empty for around 10 years. It was vacant because the owners had passed away and the Executor to the estate couldn’t be arsed to perform his legal obligation in maintaining it as an asset of the estate.
The previous owner of my home was well aware of the whole situation as they had attempted to engage with said executor and then he basically ignored her – she actively set about hiding the problems that having an abandoned dwelling attached to yours causes – in effect she lied to me and my conveyancer.
Now that might sound like a libelous remark – but if the previous owner ever reads this and would like to take me to court over it – please be my guest, I would love it! In fact, I am going write some pretty tasty things about the Executor as well – he’s welcome to try too!
Anyhow, what I hadn’t realised was large sections of the roofing from next door were collapsing at the rear of the property – something that the previous owner was more than aware of!
This first manifested as a problem for me in mid December 2022 where the flat roof on the rear extension of next door which was directly integrated with the flat roof to my kitchen just fell in on itself during a period of bad weather and tore mine to pieces in the process!
To add to my woes it was a very wet Christmas as well – so, I had all the fun of a very damp kitchen until Jan 2023 when I could get a roofer to come and quote on a replacement flat roof. Of course, it wasn’t as simple as getting my kitchen roof done – the whole area needed to be replaced which included the section from next door which had caused the damage in the first place.
Due to being desperate, I paid for the whole area to be replaced on the condition that the Executor gave permission to let me do what I needed to. Of course he agreed as he was getting a new roof for free (I will come onto why I was paying for the whole thing – the intention was to reclaim the cost at a later point, but that went south very quickly).
After a lot of research I opted for a Glass Re-enforced Plastic (GRP) roof – I know some folks are fans, others hate them – but after historic experience of felt, flat roofing systems and that I wanted a warm roof – GRP suited my needs best.
Also, the roofer that I used lives just over the road from me and is a decent geezer with very good reviews – I liked his work a lot and also figured that you’re less likely to stitch someone up who lives less than 30 seconds away from you!
With the roof replaced (and a fine job it was too) – I thought that I was on the home straight and I could get on with getting my little cottage looking the way I wanted.
Bloody hell I was so wrong.
It was about three weeks after I had the roof done when I realised that I still had water ingress all along the back Kitchen wall – both from the bottom – AND – from the top.
I called the roofer back and he did a really close look at all the work his team did and suggested to me that the cause of the continued damp was coming from damaged render on the property next door which ran parallel to my kitchen roof. Considering what I knew at the time this did make sense – so I contacted a general builder to re-render the walls on next door.
At this point, whilst I didn’t have permission from the executor to have this work done – I was beyond caring. I just needed the work done – and – I figured, worst case scenario I had something done to next door at my own cost which would make things better.
So, along came the said builder and about an hour into the job he popped inside and asked me to come and have a look at something.
Turns out – he wanted to stop the job!
His reason was he’d gotten up onto the top of the wall (which formed the support for another section of next door, which also happened to be a flat roof) and found that it had totally collapsed. I mean totally. As in – there wasn’t a roof there any longer. He also pointed out that adjacent to this roof was a tiled pitched roof where the gully had shifted and due to a combination of the failure of the flat roof and the gully moving – rain water would drain straight down into the cavity wall which at the bottom was the rear of my kitchen wall. He explained to me that he didn’t want to take my money as the work wouldn’t solve the problem that he had been employed to do.
This was both very kind and honest – but I told him that I needed him to finish as by the time he had realised all of this – he’d taken most of the render off next door. So at the very least I needed that making good.
Armed with this information I stared to consider if I really needed to explore legal options regarding the situation that I found myself in. I thought that I would try one last time to try and reason with the executor – which resulted in being ignored yet again.
I got busy with work and life and let things go for a while and then the final straw happened. One morning I came downstairs to make a cup of tea and the kettle wasn’t working. Odd I thought … “it’s a pretty new kettle” and then I also noticed that the clock on the oven was off.
Erm … Ok, the chances of both the oven and the kettle dying on me are remote, so off I popped to the CCU (you may know this as the consumer unit or fuse board) for the Shire.
I immediately saw that the cooker, hob and socket ring for the kitchen had tripped on the board.
“ It took all of three seconds for me to realise what had happened – and it wasn’t good!
All of the termination points in the kitchen were chased into the walls. So – sockets and cooker / hob outlets are embedded.
On top of that, all the associated twin and earth (T & E) cabling was also chased into the walls.
My best guess was that moisture from the problems with next door had finally made it into the outlets or had rotted the cables and that was causing the board to trip.
So, one call to a sparky later it was confirmed that was indeed the cause and then a further £400 later I had temporary power restored to the kitchen.
It was here that I took a decision I had no other choice to take the executor to court.
“ This turned into being a rather expensive and sobering learning experience.
It turns out, that in this country – if you are legally responsible for a property which is causing damage and nuisance through willful neglect to another property and legal proceedings are taken against you – all you need to do is …. nothing.
“ And I mean absolutely fucking nothing.
Ignore the solicitors letters. ignore the calls – just let the other person spend thousands on solicitors and don’t respond.
The law can’t compel people to respond in civil matters and in the case of property neglect where the other side doesn’t respond – your options, legally become:
- Pay for a court admissible survey of both properties (this, of course needs the other side to agree to access).
- If the other side doesn’t agree with access – or – just ignores the letters, you then need to apply to a court to give you an injunction which gives you access.
- If you get the injunction and the survey comes out in your favour – you then have to apply for another injunction to a court to compel the other side to act.
- They of course, don’t have to act – they can ignore the injunction. They could also claim they don’t have the funds to make good on the problems.
- Normally, if there was a grant of probate in play – the money to pay for the repairs would be taken from the estate – but if the executor has basically sat his arse on his hands for 15 years and not even gotten that – guess what, your shit out of luck!
So – by this point, if you have done 1 – 5 above, you’ve spent around £15k (yes, fifteen thousand pounds) on legal bills and gotten absolutely no where.
You then ask your solicitor what your options are – and this is where it gets really good, and believe me you can’t make this shit up.
- You can apply to a court for yet another injunction – but – get this: this injunction gives YOU right of access to the damaged property so YOU can spend YOUR money on completing the repairs!!!!!!!
- At the end of that – you have to go to court again to recoup your financial losses – BUT – you are not likely to see more than 60% of your fees (building work and legal).
- A court may also determine and grant you a right to sell the damaged property on behalf of the estate – but again you will not see any money for doing all of that work on behalf of some absolute arsehole who willfully put you and your family through hell.
Now – you ready for the ESTIMATED bill for 1 – 3 above?
-£60,000 – £80,000 plus VAT (in legal costs)
And for me in terms of investment for me to fix next door – I estimated that to be around another £40,000 – so best case I was looking at finding £90k (on top of the £15k that I had already spent) so £105K and worst case £135k (exclusive of VAT which would be another 20% on top).
Out of that I would be lucky to see £63K (of £105k) in the best case or £81K (of £135k).
By the time I got to the point above – looking at £100k’s worth of spend on something that was by no means certain of a positive or indeed an acceptable outcome I thought:
“Fuck that shit!
I had spent my first four years in my cottage fighting fires and never being able to truly enjoy it, spending an obscene amount of money – most of which was wasted – and was now faced with losing the place through financial ruin because of a useless, duplicitous, selfish man who was happy to let a house fall into disrepair so he didn’t need to inconvenience himself and his little life at the expense of mine. To then find out that there is absolutely no protection under the law against this from happening unless you’re ready to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds.
I do hope that karma gets hold of this odious little man one day – I really do.
I would love to name and shame him on here – and the person who sold me this house in the FULL knowledge of all the problems before they passed them onto me – but I know that will probably get me into trouble legally, but, it’s not inconceivable that they won’t read this someday and you will know who you are!
“ What was my solution I hear you ask?!
I got drunk. Very drunk. The kind of drunk where even three days later you wish you were dead.
When the haze cleared (a couple of days later) – I did actually have a plan! It wasn’t a perfect plan – but it wouldn’t cost me the Earth and, whilst not solving the issues next door – it would allow for me to get some rest-bite for a few years so I could both make the place nice, the kitchen usable and hopefully sort out a longer term approach.
Previously I had looked into tanking systems. I suspected that had both Rising and penetrating damp in the kitchen – with the penetrating being the worst part of it because there wasn’t much I could do about that unless next door was sorted. I had ruled it out at the time as:
- Tanking is expensive as a damp solution. It’s effective – but costs quite a bit per square meter.
- I have expected that I would legally be able to resolve the situation next door.
Given that I was now shit out of luck – tanking the kitchen seemed like my only option.
Tanking for those of you who aren’t familiar kind of does what it says on the tin. Impacted areas (walls) are stripped back to the brick then either some kind of water proof membrane is mechanically fixed to the walls and then plastered over and skimmed. This then forms a permanent barrier between the damp and the surface. Basically you build a waterproof tank within your room that moisture cannot get through.
Membrane based tanking is effective, but does deteriorate – and probably needs to be done again within 10 – 15 years, but there are slurry based methods which can last up to 30 years or more – so I opted for NatCem35.
So, the gallery below is just some of the photos of the preparation and the process of the tanking that I had done.
The kitchen needed to be ripped out which I decided to do myself as it saved me a load of cash (which I subsequently spent on replacing the kitchen). It also gave me a chance to remove all of the embedded wiring (chased) as in the new kitchen I wanted to surface mount it.
The gallery also covers the application of the NatCem slurry and the final plaster skim.
You might be wondering what the kitchen looks like now – below are a couple of photos of the finished article – I won’t go into huge detail, as I will be doing a series on it in the “Projects” section of the site.
So, that pretty much brings you all up to date of my adventures. It’s hard to cram into 3 posts of around 8000 words everything that happened – and almost impossible to completely remember the order in which things went down – but what this hopefully does is give you as the reader an idea of the steep learning curve that I have had.
Despite all the stress, tears, anger, frustration and dark moments – there are a few things which are really positive to come out of the entire saga.
Along the way, I have had to learn a lot of stuff about a lot of trade areas – and with the cottage now “stable” I can now use those skills towards making my home look nice through the skills that I have learned. What started out as being a inconvenient necessity is now a hobby and bit of a passion!
Now that intro (or three part rant) is now out of the way – I can get on with chronicling the fun stuff 😀