House with defective lintels

Qualcuno

My partner and I have seen a house we really like, but there seems to be a big problem with the window lintels.

Quite a few of the lintels have sagged in the middle. This has caused significant cracking above the windows on the interior walls. In one of the worst cases, there looks to have been some repointing of the exterior wall above and the sagging lintel has damaged the double glazing by bending the upvc frame. The lintels look to be made of concrete (but painted white, so not 100% certain).

The house is mid 60's chalet style detached, 4 bedrooms total (2 upstairs and 2 downstairs).

If anyone has any experience with this, my questions are...

• Does it affect whether the property is mortgageable?
• What kind of survey do we need to tell us the cause of the issue and how to fix it? I don't want to get a survey and for them to simply write that there's a problem with the lintels!
• Any ballpark ideas of how much this would be to fix? If it was say 5 lintels?

If you have any ideas or opinions about this it would be amazingly helpful!

Slithery

My guess would be that this has occurred because the property was designed and built with aluminium framed windows. A lot of the time this is replaced with UPVC without the owners realising that the metal frame provided part of the structural support.

cjmillsnun

I doubt a 60s house would have DG of any kind originally, but it may well have had steel framed single glazed windows or wooden framed windows.

Either way, it looks like the windows were part of the structure of the house.

As it is, it is likely unmortgageable as there are structural issues, although fixing it is relatively straightforward. You ideally want to get some steel up there (something like a catnic lintel) above the window behind the brickwork. Personally, if you are looking to buy, walk.

Cakeguts

Does the house appear to be cheap for what it is? If so that is because it has these problems.

Margot123

I imagine, with such structural defects, the mortgage company would require 100% retention.

There are plenty more fish in the sea..........

Qualcuno

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments

cjmillsnun wrote: »

As it is, it is likely unmortgageable as there are structural issues, although fixing it is relatively straightforward.

Cakeguts wrote: »

Does the house appear to be cheap for what it is? If so that is because it has these problems.

Cakeguts, I'm a pretty cynical person! You never get something for nothing. The house is a bit of a project in other ways but nothing scary, mainly it's issues we'd be fairly comfortable with apart from this one big one.

Asking price has been reduced by 100k since going on the market, and the estate agent reckons they'd still accept 20k less. I really don't think this is a 6 figure issue, like you say cjmillsnun it seems to have a fairly straightforward solution. But if we can't get a mortgage then our hands our tied.

konark

Qualcuno wrote: »

Asking price has been reduced by 100k since going on the market, and the estate agent reckons they'd still accept 20k less.

Estate Agent really earning his fee from the sellers there!