Neighbour has a room under my house!

flashnazia

I don't know if anyone else has heard of this.

The plan of my house shows me as the owner of the whole plot.

But my neighbour's cellar runs slightly into my cellar which means he has a room underneath my home.

I'm quite worried about this. He is in there now with a sledgehammer smashing up the floor and my whole floor is resonating with the force.

He assures us that he has consulted an engineer and knows what he is doing.

Has anyone heard of neighbouring cellars overunning into the next property like this?

I'm annoyed as I would have thought twice about buying the place if I had known.

(No, I didn't get a survey done; I bought at a time when the time taken to get a survey would have lost me the house to gazumpers. )

Browntoa

solicitor should have pointed this out if its correct as it should be on the title deeds

survey just comments on the state of the fabric of the building , not the ownership

flashnazia

I've got a copy of the deeds and there is nothing on it to indicate the cellar problem.

Mojisola

flashnazia wrote: »

I've got a copy of the deeds and there is nothing on it to indicate the cellar problem.

Can you be sure he hasn't move the cellar wall over into your property? Does all the brickwork look the same?

flashnazia

Nah, he hasn't moved anything. I would have realised if he had!

What I thought was a filled-in void in my cellar, is actually a room adjoining his.

I am just not happy with someone having access to the underside of my house

wallbash

Google flying freeholds, might give you some ideas

Mojisola

flashnazia wrote: »

What I thought was a filled-in void in my cellar, is actually a room adjoining his.

What's supporting the wall between the two houses?

Thomas_Crown

flashnazia wrote: »

I don't know if anyone else has heard of this.

The plan of my house shows me as the owner of the whole plot.

But my neighbour's cellar runs slightly into my cellar which means he has a room underneath my home.

Has anyone heard of neighbouring cellars overunning into the next property like this?

I havn't heard of a cellar running under an adjoining property but I have seen something similar at ground level. Many years ago I visited an old cottage in the village of Cam, South Gloucestershire & off the ground floor living room was a small room about 4 feet wide & 10 feet long. This room was under one of next door's first floor bedrooms & in front of one of the ground floor rooms.

There is a legal name for this sort of thing. I will try & find out but iirc it's called ''a right of ?????????''. I would have thought that this sort of thing only occurs in very old property.

Flashnazia, how old is your house?

flashnazia

What's supporting the wall between the two houses?

I don't know. I should have said earlier, my home is a victorian terrace (well technically a back to back.

My guess is the the party wall is not a load bearing one? (I may not know what I am talking about here!)

andrew-b

flashnazia wrote: »

(No, I didn't get a survey done; I bought at a time when the time taken to get a survey would have lost me the house to gazumpers. )

Regardless of whether it would have identified the problem your excuse for not having a survey done was a bad one especially being an older house more likely to have problems! For future reference what you should have done in that case was to have made an offer "subject to survey" and asked the vendor (via their estate agent) for the house to be taken off the market in order to secure your offer over it. If you had lost the property it wouldn't have mattered (though annoying all the same!)...perhaps a case of needing to not get too emotionally attached to the property your buying?

Although more difficult to identify than a normal above ground "flying freehold" a survey might have questioned the apparently filled void in the cellar or a mismatch in dimensions of the cellar to the rooms above.

Sounds to me more like the current owner or a previous owner has for whatever reason extended their cellar to somewhere they shouldn't have ...or maybe even came to an undocumented agreement with a previous owner of your own house.

I think you need to get some sound legal advice by a solicitor and take things from there. As you say yourself if you'd known about it you'd have thought twice about buying the property...so it makes it more difficult should you ever decide to sell yourself (unless you let it go and hope it will go unnoticed!).

Andy

LandyAndy

Mojisola wrote: »

What's supporting the wall between the two houses?

The Party Wall Act 1996?

Nothing to say that the party wall doesn't extend into the cellar and this is an additional room accessed through it.