Missing balustrade on stairs

GixerKate

I'd be amazed if it gets flagged as unsafe and I wouldn't have thought the offer should reflect less the cost of including a balustrade as its something you want not something that is mandatory.

Ramouth

It will come up in your survey as it doesn’t meet current building regs.  It will not bother your mortgage company.  It doesn’t cost much to add guarding but you might want to check that you can still get furniture up/ down if you do.  We don’t have guarding which bothered me for the first day or so but we got used to it really quickly.

Grabs39

We had a balustrade replaced this year for just over £1000, including paying the carpenter and a new matching handrail. That was in quite nice oak; pine would have been cheaper so a few hundred would get the job done.  SImilarly, a local handyman probably would have been cheaper than the specialist carpenter we hired, but we just wanted it done in a reasonable time with everything included and ordered for us.  It only took a day to actually do the work. 

We had it replaced because 1) it was loose anyway and 2) the bars were 8 inches apart which could be an issue when family/friends with young children visit (I think to meet current regs they need to be 100mm/4 inches apart at the widest) and 3) we were going to redecorate anyway so it was the best time to just get it done. 

Ours was raised on our survey as a red/urgent/3 thing, but our lender didn't care. 

As others have said it's probably not a big enough issue to think about when valuing the house.

[Deleted User]

TheJP said:

Surely you offered on the house from what you viewed. Asking for a reduction for something you want that isn't part of the sale is unreasonable in my opinion.

Thanks for the advice, I was considering the cost pre-offer and as it’s likely to be in the low hundreds I’ve factored this into the cost of buying.