UK house quality

TELLIT01

I may have missed it but I haven't seen anybody ask what the OP believes is a reasonable rental cost or purchase price for a house. I was watching a programme today (filmed in 2014) where 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom houses in Italy were on sale for around £200k. My current 3 bed semi in the West of England would have cost considerably more even then.
If the OP is expecting to match those sort of prices they are in for a huge disappointment.

Rocksolid

I don't know what you mean for OP.

I know in Italy prices are half of what they should be.

omendata

I should have learned my lesson from 50 years ago with all the Barratt jokes at school but i bought a Barratt house in Toponthank in Kilmarnock and this was 20 years ago.

When i moved in the back garden was rubble and had not been completed.

The front lawn was so bad when it was flymowed for the first time the mower just chopped the tops off the grass as it was so uneven and it looked like it had been taken from a cow field it was so bad - saw Watchdog programme recently and a so called professional was doing just that using a cowfield to provide top quality turf lol

The house itself had over 100 faults

I got friendly with one of the sparkies and he told me that most of the houses had the plumbing installed by non corgi certified engineers and yip 7 houses in my road flooded - one was condemned by the council and locked up and no one was allowed to buy it - my next door neighbours flooded and my plumbing was also constantly making noises at night making sleeping an issue then the radiators started leaking.

As it was the last house completed it was nevver registered with Scottish Power so i had free electricity all the time i was there and probably still is if the new buyer had been canny!

Then we had the double glazing which was wood yip wood instead of plastic and the paint started to look dodgy after only a short while.

There are so many other things but within two weeks of moving in I already had it up for sale and never truly moved in and just left all my stuff in the garage until i moved elsewhere and bought an old 60's house which has never given me a single problem!

Its true what they used to say about the Barratt helicopter ad and their terrible build quality but now it seems Persimmon and all the others are just as bad - the main thing seems to be maximising profit by using cheap fabrication - mainly the cement and bricks there are some sites in England that have buildings cracking and crumbling after less than a year!

So the best advice i can give is to buy an old 50's60's70's house - in our area the absolute best you can buy are the old JOHN LAWRENCE houses they have massive gardens and every one has a different design so each old estate looks beautiful with tree lined streets , gardens and lawns like a golf course unlike all the little brown box prisons with postage stamp gardens going up on every bit of green belt these days - very sad!

robatwork

OP is largely correct, certainly in some aspects.

Mainly in our wall and floor construction in terrace/semi/flats.

I see plenty of houses in Europe that have concrete floors above the ground floor, not our suspended joist and floorboards. Much better for sound insulation, and obviously more solid. Similar for walls - ours are easier to reconfigure but concrete just feels like it will last 100s of years, and not carry sounds between rooms.

Our plastic gutters are also generally a bit crappy, our windows seem to attach to the top of the house, and our designers rarely build new estates with any originality or anything other than brick facades.

On the plus side, we tend to bury pipes inside the walls but I see plenty of ugly water pipes outside said concrete walls...but conversely our soil pipes tend to run outside the wall whereas on the continent they are often buried inside much more tidily.

I blame our architects and council planners taking safe (and cheap) decisions.

omendata

TELLIT01 wrote: »

I may have missed it but I haven't seen anybody ask what the OP believes is a reasonable rental cost or purchase price for a house. I was watching a programme today (filmed in 2014) where 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom houses in Italy were on sale for around £200k. My current 3 bed semi in the West of England would have cost considerably more even then.
If the OP is expecting to match those sort of prices they are in for a huge disappointment.

Try Slovakia I just bought myself a second home out there for
£110,000 - has three floors 5 bedrooms and lower garage floor with a summer kitchen and barbecue area, cherry, walnut, apple and plum tree orchards with garden full of strawberries and kitchen garden greenhouses and its quite the healthiest food, air and nicest people i have ever met - the village i live in has not had a single serious crime in 20 years!

When you look out your window in the morning do you see a concrete jungle with feral neighbours stabbing and committing every crime under the sun - but here is what is see!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwA5_NTFPzG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

UK is finished, once i am settled up i will leave this crime ridden. politically correct hellhole for good and will be glad never to return!

jennifernil

May be regional, never had a problem up here in Scotland. I believe our building regs are tighter than down south.

We have had two second hand Wimpy type 1960/70s detached houses with few problems, then in 1988 we bought a plot and supervised the build of a house to our own design, this obviously was built how we wanted it to be built.


We did have a few problems, but once we pointed out that we were paying and we wanted things done in a certain manner, they soon got the idea that they should do what we wanted!

Our DD has had a fairly new flat, no real soundproofing problems, then a new build terraced townhouse which was very good with excellent soundproofing. Both were reasonably well built, especially the townhouse, which I think was well above average build quality, well done by a smallish company.

Now she is in a much older property, 1920s, where it seems there are no standards!!

However, the neighbours are all very nice, and no crime so far!

jennifernil

Regarding pipes.....all our soil pipes are inside the house, only gutter down pipes are on the outside.

Even then, the ones from the rear of the house, it is a large house, go in under the floor to go from back to front of the house.

Rocksolid

@omendata you can't compare countries where the law is very strong and inequality is low, do not talk about low immigration, everybody knows that many people come in UK to find the paradise in their pocket and in the end they finish to commit crimes to survive, and the London zone is the Red zone for this.

But please let's remain on the building quality speech, or I should start also to consider other countries where to buy rather than UK where I live, which is not that easy to manage, especially to get a mortgage for that.

Davesnave

omendata wrote: »

Try Slovakia I just bought myself a second home out there .....nicest people i have ever met - the village i live in has not had a single serious crime in 20 years!

When you look out your window in the morning do you see a concrete jungle with feral neighbours stabbing and committing every crime under the sun....

UK is finished, once i am settled up i will leave this crime ridden. politically correct hellhole for good and will be glad never to return!

Ah, you've removed a home from the local stock over there so you can have a second one. That's nice!

People do this in the part of the UK where I live too, so some villages are like ghost towns in winter and local youngsters are priced out.

Our village hasn't had much in the way of serious crime in the 10 years I've been here. My friend did have 39 sheep rustled, however. The last burglary I can think of was carried out by East Europeans, who waited in a van till an old guy of 86 went to collect his paper from the shop. Like many here, he'd never had cause to lock his door before.

Anyway, you enjoy your time in Slovakia and I'll see out the rest of my days in this picturesque 'hell hole.' :rotfl:

stuart45

Some of the best houses built in the 60's and 70's were Council ones. The Clerk of Works would often insist on the cavities being cleaned out every night as one example.
Not all properties built back then were high quality. I did notice a change when firms started using much more sub contract labour in the 70's.