Advice on landlord/building works problem!

susan.lily

I rent a flat in a 3 storey semi-detached period conversion and have done for the last 2.5 years.

Our landlord started re-pointing work about 11 weeks ago and the scaffolding is still up and the builders still working on it. He didn't even tell us when the work was starting so we had to find out from the builders what was going on! As we live in the top floor flat we've also got the joys of the plastic sheeting (put up to protect the work their doing) blowing in the wind and rain so we can't hear the tv/radio without the volume up really high and it keeps my boyf awake at night. :mad:

I complained to the landlord without specifically asking for a rebate and he apologized for the inconvenience, unsurprisingly without offering anything. I didn't pursue at the time, as I've had other stresses at work and with family to deal with.

Apparently the scaffolding is going to be up for least another 3 weeks, and now it's come to the crunch that I've really had enough and want to ask for some of the rent money back for our inconvenience and the invasion of privacy (I work from home some days and constantly have builders walking past and we can't open our bed room curtains in the morning either...

That'll make it 14 weeks in total - almost 1/4 a year that we've been paying rent for a flat that's having work on... I feel quite cross as he wouldn't have been able to rent it to newbies without offering a discount for that period. Our landlord is generally a fairly nice guy but I think he's really taken advantage of us here

I'm hoping it's not too late to ask for our rent for this period to be discounted. I'd really appreciate advice from anyone that's been in a similar situation and and recommendations on how much rent % rebate we should request for our inconvenience.

Thanks in advance for your advice

princeofpounds

Part of the difficulty here is that the law doesn't view it as always unreasonable that a tenant should be disrupted if such a thing would be unavoidable for an owner-occupier. And in some way, that's fair.

I presume that these workmen are technically being employed by the freeholder to fix the whole block exterior, and are not actually accessing the areas demised to you in your AST? I.e. they aren't actually working in your flat?

If they were in your property, you could just deny access, but as they are probably not it's harder - even an owner-occupier would have to put up with a freeholder's works if required. So there isn't an explicitly obvious route to get restitution, except to tell the LL you are upset and threaten to leave unless you get some recognition of your inconvenience.

If they are building out of permitted hours, or causing an unacceptable noise, then you could approach the council for help.

Maybe someone else could help, or if not here, try landlordzone forums.