Would you take legal action against your house's previous owners?

JustAnotherSaver

Regards "should've got structural" or "should've spoken to neighbours...

Like i say, i should've picked the winning lottery numbers too, but i didn't. What's done is done & we can't do anything about that so going over that side of it is absolutely pointless.
What isn't pointless is discussing where you'd/we go from here, this point on.

GwylimT wrote: »

if you had a survey it would have identified the damp issue,

Interesting.

I'm not saying you're wrong/right, but our IFA told us that it wouldn't have identified the water under the boards had we paid the extra for structural. Either way, it's done with now.

We had it sealed

What do you mean - "sealed"? Not being funny but i know what sealing is, but what did you have done specifically?

I_have_spoken wrote: »

TBH, I'd expect the seller to say 'no' it's never flooded because when we lived there the sump-pump kept the ground-water in check. Has it broken since we sold..oh, dear!

Don't get me wrong, i'm not coming here whinging about the seller.

Oh & it was no to 7.1 btw.

I'm not moaning about the seller because ATEOTD what is your definition of flooding?

A river running half way up your living room wall?
Water just & so breaching your floorboards?
Water up to but not quite at your floorboards?
Or 5" of water below your boards causing damp & blistering on the walls?

If we ask 100 people i bet some would've ticked yes. I'm not saying the majority because i bet the majority would tick no, but it's down to your interpretation i suppose.

JustAnotherSaver

I would've thought that with dealing with helping people through the house buying process that he would've had some idea of what he was talking about, otherwise saying "i don't know".

GwylimT

Our sealing basically involved concreting the floor, with infill material and damp proofing, we of course had to make sure that this wouldn't cause any problems for the next door neighbours and seek their permission as the living room wall is joined to theirs.

Running_Horse

Treating new decorations and furniture as suspicious is a little naive as most people decorate before selling and everyone has furniture. And if it was so suspicious then why did you fail to spot it? Not everything is someone else's fault, especially as you did not have a full survey.

MysteryMe

So you are not whinging at the seller, just want to sue them?


The questions you are dismissing as hindsight will be the exact same ones put to you in court, you may need something better to come up with than "my IFA told me...." Especially when you had a homebuyers report that identified damp.

vivatifosi

I don't know if it would help OP but we sued our surveyors. We had paid for a full structural survey and they messed up.

The long and the short of it though is that even if you win, you would not receive back the full cost to put right. I can't remember the name of the precedent case, but the damages received equate more to the difference between what price was paid for the house and what you would have paid had you known. This works out not as the total cost to put right, but from memory something like 40% of the cost to put right.

I don't know if this is any consolation, but I hope it helps you stop thinking "if only".

JustAnotherSaver

GwylimT wrote: »

Our sealing basically involved concreting the floor, with infill material and damp proofing, we of course had to make sure that this wouldn't cause any problems for the next door neighbours and seek their permission as the living room wall is joined to theirs.

Tis exactly what's been suggested to me here.

It's all relative, but was this quite costly? £1000s rather than £10,000s?

Everything has a down side though & i tried to find one for that solution & came across what i quoted in post #96 last night: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=64159132&postcount=96

What's your experience with your walls after sealing the floor?

MysteryMe wrote: »

So you are not whinging at the seller, just want to sue them?

From this i can only assume (quite rightly) you haven't either 1) read or 2) understood my posts.

JustAnotherSaver

Scrootum wrote: »

I would suspect he just wanted the sale completed so he would get paid.

Maybe, maybe not.

You'll get some who are all about the money & sod who gets in their way.

You'll get others who obviously will be wanting to get paid for their work, but enjoy helping others & will go above & beyond to do so.

martinthebandit

I may be missing something here, but why not get the sump pump fixed so it works automatically as it should?

JustAnotherSaver

I've asked these Qs in the sump pump thread but if i get the response here then i'm not choosy where the answers are coming from..

My concern was that the pump would damp near always be on. Not when it rains a bit & the water level rises. It gets to 4.5" in at least 7 hours - because after i drained it, 7 hours later it was back at 4.5".

So i spoke to someone today who said that if it was damn near always on (such as every hour it's kicking in) then this would be a bad thing. This chap has actually seen under my floorboards. He said the reasoning for it being bad is that it'll take all "the fines" out of the soil & then spoke of movement due to this.

So while a working sump pump would be great - i'm just concerned it's almost always going to be on & taking the floor with it as it's not clean water.

Other options would be solid floor as mentioned here, or if we couldn't afford (as there's a lot of void to fill) then concrete beams & blocks instead of timber joists & floorboards.