Advice on landlord refusing to pay to repair garage

Supadupa

Hi there,

I'm looking for a bit of advice. We moved into a rented property last week that has a detached garage. We did not view the garage when we went to see the house - it's a bog standard single garage.

There was heavy rain the night before we moved in and when we got the keys and opened the garage the floor was really flooded. It has since dried up but there are gaps in the walls between the bricks and it is clearly not sealed properly. I have no doubt that the same will happen again when we next have heavy rain.

We have a lot of things to store in the garage and are concerned about our bikes rusting and more importantly my husband's sports equipment (martial sparring gloves and pads - he run's classes and has a lot of these) getting damaged.

I emailed the landlord (who I've never met but he gave me his email address) to ask if we could get quotes to repair the garage. The agency who manage the property have phoned today to say to go ahead and get the quotes but he will not pay for the repair. Apparently his response is -'if we'd asked if the garage was wind and water tight he would have told us it wasn't.' However we didn't think we had reason to ask! The garage was advertised as part of the property. We have a bit of paper from the agency declaring the property is 'wind and water tight and fit for human habitation' but I'm not sure if this should include the garage.

Where do we stand with this, we need the garage but I don't think we should be paying for repairs to his property.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks

Notmyrealname

You stand nowhere. Under law he has no obligation to repair a garage other than to make it safe. So unless it is actually at risk of falling down or you can't get into it, he is not obliged to do any repairs to it.

A garage is for temporarily storing a vehicle in and pretty much 99.999999% of all cars in the UK can cope with getting wet. If you choose to use it for purposes other than parking a car in it then that is your problem but you have no legal right to a watertight garage.

Mrs_Imp

Get the quotes, then see if it'll be cheaper to buy a shed/storage for the garden, or even to put up inside the garage. You can take that with you when you go, so you won't be out of pocket.

Fire_Fox

Get some racking that keeps your belongings off the floor or a plastic 'shed'. As stated it is a garage not a watertight storage facility, a garage is never fit for human habitation.