Our last move, a review on buying
a bungalow for our retirement
Independent Building Surveyors
If you are looking for a property for your retirement and would like it to be your last move than you need to have a Building Survey carried out to ensure the property is what you were expecting it to be . Our Surveyors can provide help and advice with regard to the property and can carry out building surveys, structural surveys, home buyers reports, independent valuations, property surveys, engineers reports, structural reports and specific defects reports.
Please free phone 0800 298 5424 for a friendly chat with one of our surveyors.
This property has a hipped pitched roof
Why should you have a Building Survey carried out?
Our clients were looking to move house for the final time as they were retired. They wanted to find the perfect house that was in a quiet village location but not too far away from local amenities. The property that they found seemed perfect for them but it turned out it was too good to be true.
Caveat Emptor, Buyer Beware
Caveat emptor means Buyer Beware and this is why, if you are considering buying a property, you need to have a building survey carried out to find out if there are any problems within the property that you need to be aware of.
Often estate agents will not advise you of these as they have been commissioned to sell the property, nothing more and nothing less.
Dampness is a problem that we often come across in older properties
A little bit about the property
This particular property was a large detached bungalow built during the War Years. The bungalow had good sized gardens and had been finished internally to a very high standard. It had also been altered and amended considerably to provide more space. As we said it initially looked perfect! Our client needed to be extra careful with any property they bought as they were purchasing as a cash buyer.
Structural problems in the roof
During the course of our survey we noted structural problems with the property that the clients would not have noticed themselves, for example, when we inspected the roof space we noted some of the supporting purlins has been cut, this is unusual and not good practice. We recommended to our client that if they purchased the property then the roof would need the purlins replacing.
Purlins Defined
The purlin is the horizontal timber member usually running from gable end to gable end and parallel with the walls, which supports the jack or common rafters (the angled rafters forming the slope to the roof).
Purlins in cut timber roof help
support the roof, in this case they
had been cut
Alterations to the property
Unfortunately during the survey, on close inspection, we noted that the alterations had not followed conventional construction techniques. We also found out that these amendments had been carried out without the correct Building Regulations approval. Luckily we were also able to find before and after floor plans from the Estate Agents details that showed how the layout of the walls had showed how the property had changed.
Problems with the structure of a
roof can push walls out
Walls have been removed
The plans revealed that the wall in the kitchen had been partly removed which in turn had put additional stress and strain on the pier between the alterations and the kitchen door. We could see a hairline crack where the alterations had taken place, however as the property had been recently immaculately decorated throughout it was very difficult to see if there were any other cracks. From the plans we could also see that other walls had been removed.
Externally we could see that a ridge on one of the roofs had dropped slightly which related to where the wall had been removed in the kitchen.
Example of a wall removed
without a pier support
Further meeting and discussion with our client
Interestingly the owner had not been keen on either us or our client looking at the right hand side of the property. We decided to get up on the roof so that we could look down at this area but unfortunately it is not the same as being able to inspect it closely but we suspect that there were structural problems in that area as well.
We later had a further meeting with our client and the architect who had drawn the original design alterations only to find that the architect had not drawn up some of the alterations that had been carried out.
You may find our surveying articles on property problems helpful.
Structural walls or non structural walls?
Roofs and Structural Problems
Why are our surveys better than the competition?
Information on cracking and movement
How the removal of trees can cause problems
Another issue that we discovered during our survey concerned the removal of a large amount of trees from the rear garden. The owner advised us that he had removed in the region of sixty conifer trees. Whilst the root ball on a conifer is not as large as with many trees it can often be how their roots absorb water from the soil that is of help to the lands irrigation system and when the trees are removed they can cause problems such as heave.
Heave Defined:
Heave is an upward movement caused by activity in the ground. When water is not taken away by the roots of trees the water gets back into the clay soil and effectively expands.
Large conifers
Further investigations
We decided to investigate the removal of the trees further and obtained images via Google Earth that showed how the property looked a few years ago. We were surprised to find that there were extremely large trees to the front of the property that had since been removed. The owner or the Estate Agent did not mention these trees to us or our client!
High risk purchase, is it worth it?
After our client had discussed our report with both the owners and the Estate Agent about the lack of Building Regulations regarding the alterations and how to resolve the problems they were basically told that if they did not go ahead with the purchase quickly then they would put the house back on the market.
Our client told us that alarm bells were ringing and so decided to do the sensible thing and pull out of the purchase. At the end of the day our client felt that the owner was not being honest about the alterations that had been carried out and as such they were not prepared to take on a property with this level of risk.
Our circles, ovals and sketches in our reports?
Within our reports we utilise a system of ovals and circles to highlight problem areas or characteristics within a property to better explain the issues. If this does not explain the issue completely then we can also use one of our sketches that have been commissioned exclusively for us for use in the reports.
Plumbing pipes
Micro bore pipe
Our Good, Bad & Ugly surveys!
If you are in the process of buying a property we would like to tell you about what we call our good, bad and ugly survey. This is a Building Survey also sometimes known as a structural survey. We have developed this over many years, in fact several decades. We have listened to feedback from our clients and amended and altered our survey reports to make them easy to read and describe issues clearly. The key factor we believe is our Independent Surveys are easy to understand and written in plain English.
We have many other surveying articles for you to read, have a look at our website
Please have a good look around our website to see how much detail we go into regarding property and its associated problems in our articles. We go into this much depth and detail within our reports as well.
We trust you found the article of use and if you have any experiences that you believe should be added to this article that would benefit others, or you feel that some of the information that we have put is wrong then please do not pause to contact us (we are only human). Your comments will be appreciated.
The contents of the website are for general information only and are not intended to be relied upon for specific or general decisions. Appropriate independent professional advice should be taken before making such a decision.
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