Trust vendor to repair?

panic-prone

Hi all

Scared and confused first time buyer here. Sorry please bear with me as I present the facts.

I am buying a property (built c. 1900) which has been recently refurbished. The vendor bought it on the cheap, did it up and is selling to me chain free. I paid for a structural survey and a few issues were identified. I asked the vendor to rectify the major ones being:

1. Damp on side wall (this is an end of terrace)
2. Provide extra support to sagging roof (only slight sagging)
3. Timber treatment (there were signs of wood worm infestation)
4. Downpipe at the back of the property was releasing water to the ground (i.e. it was open ended and water was being discharged to the ground about 3 inches from the house wall)

Bearing in mind that this property was just done up, some of the defects were not immediately obvious. Anyhow, the vendor says he will deal with all the above. After a week the vendor says all work is done and provides an invoice from a timber/damp company showing that 1-3 above is done.

The date I raised those issues (I visited the property with the vendor present) was 27 November, Saturday. The date the works were completed, based on document from the timber/damp specialist is 4 December (i.e. the following Saturday). The cost was £822 for doing 1,2 and 3 from the above list, this was from the invoice from that timber/damp company.

My question is: Does this all sound credible? The week in question (running up to 4 Dec) is the week with that horrid snow weather and the property is in Croydon (South London) which had near-blizzard conditions. Could they have done the work properly in that short space of time? Can you do damp-proofing work when there is snow around on the ground? And the price for the work seems a bit low? The vendor is a painter-decorator by profession so he must have contacts in the industry – the reason I ask is that when I inspected the work it seemed shoddily done (and for some work like they said they sprayed/treated the wood I can’t tell!). Admittedly I am not an expert so I am just trying to ‘sense check’ if it was all possible in terms of timing and price. My worst fear is that he got a mate to just issue some paperwork to keep me happy.

They have given 10 year guarantee on their work. The company exists but Companies House website shows it was incorporated in Feb 2009 whilst the website says over they have 25 years experience...? Are these alarm bells?

The work they have done is:
- Damp proof course (no-replastering)
- Insert one air brick
- Put up 2 timber supports to roof purlins (the specialist mis-seplt this as ‘pearling’ in the document)
- Timber treatment to all roof timbers (by spraying)

In respect of the downpipe, vendor says he has connected it to a pipe that runs into a soakaway in the garden. What is visible to me during inspection is that there is now a small mound of cement all around the downpipe (i.e. it could be that the only work done is putting cement all around the side of the downpipe’s opening). Estate agent says the pipe has been joined up and the cement is to make sure it doesn’t leak and we don’t step on the joining parts/hurt ourselves etc. _pale_

For this work, there was no invoice or documents. Vendor says his uncle did it for him. I can live with the fact that it looks utterly unsightly but how do I know the work is done as it should be?
I am now also getting more and more paranoid that other parts of the house (plumbing, electrics) were not done properly if he had got an ‘uncle’ or ‘mate’ to help do it up.

All thoughts/comments are welcomed!

JQ.

Honestly, I would be more worried about all the things you can't see, as you highlight. It sounds like corners have been cut by the developer - most dodgy developers are intelligent enough to hide the corners they've cut (behind new plaster, under new flooring, etc) - it sounds like this one doesn't even have that much brain power.

david29dpo

I agree, give this one a miss.

Cannon_Fodder

You asked the vendor to rectify...he has. A bit unfair to start questioning how he does it. You gave away the right to quality control it, by asking him to do it.

As for sense-checking - with the weather, maybe there were enough local handymen not travelling away to other jobs, who could stroll round the corner to do the needful for him...

You must know your own character, and whether you would be doubting or not...you should have asked for money off to do it yourself.

Doozergirl

Come on. You're paying someone a handsome profit for bodging all of this. If you paid for a structural survey then it's not bad if that is all that came up but did they have trouble viewing things - behind walls etc?

The first thing I know needs doing as a developer is a damp proof course. It doesn't even matter if my damp guy says it doesn't need one, I know that it's the one thing that comes up in every single survey whether there is actual damp or not. Surveyor's damp meters seem to go off if someone sneezes and unless you pay for a survey, any company will sell you a DPC even if one isn't needed. If there is no guarantee for a damp proof course, it undermines my integrity immediately. Besides, if he has replastered inside, it jsut makes sense to do the DPC because as you can see, the injecting is not all that expensive. It's all the graft that goes into hacking off the plaster and replastering the walls. There will be no guarantee for that DPC if the plaster hadn't been taken back to brick to a height of 1 metre.

As for the compo around the downpipe, it would look like that if they had linked it to a soak away, but in order to get to a soak-away, you have to dig up the ground to lay the pipe to it, which should be some way away from the house really. There must be some evidence of this, even if it's all turfed, there would be evidence of dirt from the digging, or ripped trodden down turf. Plus the ground has been frozen solid! Also, why is there a soakaway? You usually do it when you're building new extensions and it's a requirement for Building Control. Unless there's a drainage issue...

The spraying of timber to treat it should be accompanied by a certificate. This comes from a specific firm, so it can take a little while to come. But it should be there.

I think this guy simply does this for a quick buck. It makes me really angry. I wouldn't pay someone for a house that a little while ago probably wasn't mortgageable at all.

Ask him to provide a detailed list of exactly what he has done. How long has he owned it; let's find out if it's an auction property perhaps.

Either be prepared to do more diggin here for issues and adjust your offer to reflect the boding or simply walk away. I wouldn't give my money to someone that clearly didn't care whether the house was fixed or not.

panic-prone

Thanks all. I always go about trusting people 'in good faith' and you don't find out if it was the right or wrong thing to do until it's too late!

G_M

So it was refurbished but did not have a damp proof course??? !!!!!

Don't walk. Run.

savanajhones

The same happened with me and I trusted my vendor and it was the wrong decision I took. But then my neighbor suggested me to go for other vendor and it was all set good.

poppysarah

did it up?
not very well.

Find one that's not been ruined by bad diy and lack of work

Jowo_2

Next time you come across major issues during a survey, arrange multiple quotes by reputable companies that belong to specialist trade bodies to inspect each issue, then either insist the vendor uses the tradesman that you have found, or negotiate the discount from the asking price and arrange the work after you have bought the property.

For damp/timber issues, you would get in an independent surveyor to inspect the property (rather than a free quote from a company who are incentivised to find extra things wrong in the property). For roof issues, you would get in companies that belong to the Federation of Master Roofers, after establishing that the status of the companies in Companies House.

By absolving yourself of any responsibility to research the appropriate specialist companies and arranging the quotes yourself, you gave permission for Mr Bodgit to treat you like a sucker and that's why they employed Mr Scarper to do the minimum. It's no good having a quick glance around after the work has been done by someone else hell bent on maximimising their profits. Mr Bodgit was probably thrilled when you suggested he remedy the work with no intervention or quality control criteria from you.