Selling your house - would you inform buyers of a serious issue that could be hidden?

Marmaduke123

JustAnotherSaver wrote: »

** I should point out, as i don't know what images are in peoples heads. When i say stream i don't mean fast flowing water. It's under the foundations & it slowly comes to the surface.

** We have checked maps from before any houses were even built on this plot. There was no stream even back then. I contacted the council who said there are many naturally occurring springs in the area.

We had this problem in the house where I lived as a child. It had a cellar, so possibly easier to fix than your situation. Water began to gradually seep into the cellar, and it took a long time to determine where it was coming from. The whole of the sewer from the house to the road was dug up to find a non existent leak.

It was eventually traced to a spring, the water from which had changed course, possibly because of nearby building work. The cellar floor was taken up and the spring water culverted as I recall, then everything reinstated. I think it was all covered by the buildings insurance at the time, I don't remember any financial concerns about it and it was a very lengthy job. But I was only a child, so maybe I didn't realise!

As for your problem, in my opinion it should be fixed before you even try to sell, or be fully disclosed.

JustAnotherSaver

Marmaduke123 wrote: »

We had this problem in the house where I lived as a child. It had a cellar, so possibly easier to fix than your situation. Water began to gradually seep into the cellar, and it took a long time to determine where it was coming from. The whole of the sewer from the house to the road was dug up to find a non existent leak.

It was eventually traced to a spring, the water from which had changed course, possibly because of nearby building work. The cellar floor was taken up and the spring water culverted as I recall, then everything reinstated. I think it was all covered by the buildings insurance at the time, I don't remember any financial concerns about it and it was a very lengthy job. But I was only a child, so maybe I didn't realise!

As for your problem, in my opinion it should be fixed before you even try to sell, or be fully disclosed.

Very interesting & probably the closest i'll get online to someone having the same experience.

I'll be dim here & say - what do you mean it was culverted? I guess you wont be able to answer perhaps if you were only little, but did this then solve your issue?

As for our house, we bought it intending NOT to ever sell it. I think IF we did sell it then for piece of mind we would be honest, take a cut in price but at least not have the worry over our heads - is someone going to come suing us.

And as my wife pointed out - you find out the address of where the owner is going to. I don't know if this is standard practice but the estate agent i think it was gave us this information in an email which seemed standard procedure.
It's just that we're 'nice people' that we haven't done anything. You get the 'wrong person' & that person may well be round knocking your front door down & having you up against the wall for 'tricking' them. You say unlikely? I'd agree. But unlikely isn't the same as impossible. So i'd go for the clear conscience.

I know these injections can/do come with a 20-30 year guarantee. That's the injections alone. Then there's the tanking on top. I think if and i mean IF that will work then that takes us to our 50s/60s so we may not need to sell the house after all.

Part of me thinks get the floor sorted, another part thinks it's extra cost & money we may not have. The floor may be good for another 30 years, who knows, so worry about it if/when it goes, but in the meantime put money in the bank for that rainy day. All food for thought & many discussions to be had over the coming days/weeks/months.

Marmaduke123

I think the water was fed through a pipe under the cellar floor. It still went under the house but in a contained way.

JustAnotherSaver

Marmaduke123 wrote: »

I think the water was fed through a pipe under the cellar floor. It still went under the house but in a contained way.

Ah i understand now. Thanks.

Little chance of that here. I shudder to think that that would entail. They'd have to dig out all the sludge & then pick axe the floor completely i imagine & then somehow channel the water into some pipe work & away somewhere. No doubt more money than i'll ever have spare in my lifetime.

lessonlearned

JAS - doesn't solve your problem obviously but just to answer your question why are we only removing one tree at a time, and why we are trimming them first.

Trees drink gallons of water each day during the summer. If you remove them all in one go you cause soil heave and it can affect the water tables, especially in heavy clay sub soil. If the trees are close to the house then there is a real risk of causing subsidence or structural damage.

Doing it slowly gives the ground time to adapt and lessons the risk of structural damage.

I know this is going off topic but you might find our issues with damp and water of interest. It may comfort you a little to know that you are not alone in fighting the war against excess moisture;) Although to be fair we don't have an underground stream to contend with, just close proximity to a river which may or may not flood. If it does then hopefully the water would find it's way into the cellar rather than the house proper. And, as I mentioned earlier, we will be installing some flood protection measures over the summer.

We have a row of conifers on one of our boundary walls which must be well over 30 feet high. They are blocking a lot of the sunlight from the garden and this is making the soil somewhat waterlogged, especially after the wet winter we've just had.

The surveyor did flag them up in his report.

I don't think conifers are the thirstiest of trees but we are being careful not to risk causing soil heave or subsidence, cutting them back in stages before removing them completely. I did read somewhere that a fully grown oak tree can drink 250 gallons of water per day in the summer……

We started on the first tree last Autumn. This was the one which was closest to the house and which the surveyor was most concerned about. The branches were actually pushing against the gable end wall, so we lopped them off straight away and then a month later took about a third off the top growth.

We also removed overgrown ivy and other types of vegetation from the walls of the house which were wrapping themselves round the guttering. At the same time we also removed soil which had drifted up the sides of the walls, giving a good one foot clearance. These were all measures to address issues with damp. This year we shall be digging a trench to improve drainage. The royal "we" - I won't be doing any actual digging….

We are talking about a seriously overgrown garden here. I always feel like David Bellamy "hacking my way through the undergrowth"

In January we pruned 6 fruit trees as savagely as we dared and we have also cut back a number of trees, climbers and shrubs.

We shall lop off a good third off the top of the conifers this year and then take it from there. That should at least let more sunlight into the garden and help the soil dry out.

We've had scaffolding up over the winter doing essential roof and chimney repairs, replacing and repairing guttering, repointing brickwork. We had a small budleah tree growing out of the guttering :rotfl: - a self set. It was about 2ft high and was forcing it's way into the brickwork. Obviously that had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. We found the parent tree and chopped that down immediately. They are very pretty but grow like triffids and their seeds will colonise even the toughest brickwork or concrete. Not quite as bad as Japanese Knotweed but bad enough.

The scaffolding is in the process of coming down so we can start making some serious inroads into the garden this weekend.

When we bought the house and moved in last July it did smell damp and musty. We immediately replaced some rotten joists and started removing the excess vegetation as described. Now that the essential remedial works have been done the house feels much drier, warmer and generally more comfortable.

It's a grade II listed building so simply injecting a chemical damp course is not the answer. Our approach to removing damp has been more "organic" working with the building, encouraging air flow, airing it out and installing a powerful energy efficient boiler.

The house had been let out for several years and various tenants had sealed up air vents, never opened any windows, had switched off radiators in unused rooms - all in an attempt to reduce heating bills, not realising that they were making the house even colder by increasing damp and condensation.

We are slowly getting there.

Because it's a listed building we have had to work closely with the conservation officer. I was concerned that he would object to us removing trees but thankfully there were no tree preservation orders in place. Luckily he is a very sympathetic and pragmatic man who is prepared to listen to reason and isn't too pedantic about every minor detail.

I think he quickly realised that we aren't vandals and that we have the best interests of both the house and garden at heart. We won't butcher any trees or plants without good cause and we will also take good care of the house, restoring and repairing rather than "modernising it to death".

I do hope you can sort out your problems. Try not to get too despondent. There is not much in a house that cant be fixed and put right. It takes time and yes sometimes you do have to throw money at it but things usually come right in the end.