Consumer advice - please

born_again

Surely the claim is against who sold the doors & that is where either the doors need to come from or a refund.

 If they have been taken as payment for a debt, then seller either has agreed, or not. But even if they did not they need to either refund OP or get the doors & provide OP with them. So maybe taking landlord to court to reclaim their goods.

Landlord & new tenants are just distractions from this point.

Okell

Yes, contractually the OP only has a claim against the seller of the doors.  But as I suspect the seller has no assets and is not in a position to refund the OP it would be a rather academic and pointless claim.

Assuming the OP can provide evidence that they bought the doors in good faith, their next step would be to take action against whoever is preventing them from taking possession of the doors - whether that's the new tenant or the landlord.

The tenant can't deny the OP access to their doors just because they are "using" them and and neither can the landlord just because the previous tenant owes them money.

The OP hasn't answered my earlier question about the original doors.  Why can't somebody (the LL or the current tenant or a third party acting on their behalf) retrieve the original doors from their container and swap them round?

(Any expenses involved in that swap should be paid by the seller, but if they've gone bust I think the OP would have to pay them.)

If either the LL (or the current tenant) could do it but refuses to do so because the previous tenant owes them money, I'd suggest they're acting unlawfully with regard to the OP under the provisions of the Torts (Interference with Goods) Act.

molerat

The problem is that they are part of the fabric of the building whether the old tenant intended that or not.  I suspect that technically they were not the old tenants to sell whilst they were part of the building, they should only have sold them to op once they had been removed from the building and replaced with the original.  The only solution that I can see is that op comes to an agreement with the landlord for the originals to be put back in at op's cost and risk.

tightauldgit

Alderbank said:

There are property law issues here.

Fixtures and fittings installed by the tenant become the property of the landlord because the principle of property law is that the owner of the land (the person registered in the land registry) owns the land and any permanent buildings and their fixtures and fittings regardless of who might have paid for them.

Where a tenant has carried out works which improve the rental value of the property he can in some circumstances claim compensation from the landlord when he quits the property but that requires knowledge of the Landlord & Tenant Act 1927, specifically sections 1, 2 and 3, Compensations and Alterations.

tl:dr When the doors were fitted to the premises they became the landlord's property.

I don't see that they became the landlord's property at that point since the tenant had the right to take them back out again and refit the original doors. And having had a commercial property I certainly wouldn't have accepted that everything I screwed to the wall became the landlord's property immediately. Normally the terms of a commercial lease are just that you have to return everything to the original condition upon exit or pay dilapidations equivalent to that. 

I see from the few more posts that it is more complicated than I had originally thought when I commented as hadn't quite appreciated the doors are fitted to the unit as working doors! However I think the key thing is still who has title to the doors. If the title legally passed from the seller to the OP then I don't think that anything subsequent can change that.

If all parties were acting in line with the law then I think the solution would be to restore the original doors to the unit and supply the other doors to the OP. Of course now there is a dispute nobody wants to play ball with anyone else. 

To my mind though if the OP owns the doors then they have rights to them and the fact that causes problems for the landlord is a matter for the landlord to resolve with their former tenant. 

sheramber

If someone orders and pays for goods and the retailer goes bankrupt that person has no claim on the ordered items , even if held in the warehouse.The goods belong to the administrator and their debt is added to the list of creditors.

Is this case any different?

Has the OP said how they paid?

Tea_biscuits

Okell said:

Yes, contractually the OP only has a claim against the seller of the doors.  But as I suspect the seller has no assets and is not in a position to refund the OP it would be a rather academic and pointless claim.

Assuming the OP can provide evidence that they bought the doors in good faith, their next step would be to take action against whoever is preventing them from taking possession of the doors - whether that's the new tenant or the landlord.

The tenant can't deny the OP access to their doors just because they are "using" them and and neither can the landlord just because the previous tenant owes them money.

The OP hasn't answered my earlier question about the original doors.  Why can't somebody (the LL or the current tenant or a third party acting on their behalf) retrieve the original doors from their container and swap them round?

(Any expenses involved in that swap should be paid by the seller, but if they've gone bust I think the OP would have to pay them.)

If either the LL (or the current tenant) could do it but refuses to do so because the previous tenant owes them money, I'd suggest they're acting unlawfully with regard to the OP under the provisions of the Torts (Interference with Goods) Act.

Neither the current tenant or Landlord are prepared to retrieve the original doors and swap them over.