Telling people the truth can sometimes hurt.

I went around a property recently. It had been extended and had a loft conversion of sorts.

Under modern building regulations staircases are suppose to have minimum headroom of 2 metres. (There are slight variations allowed.) The staircase to the loft only had 1.6m headroom. The loft room floor hadn’t been strengthened, there was a lack of fire doors and the staircase wobbled in use. Under former regulations escape from a loft room could be via a roof light as long as it was not more than 1.7 metres from the eaves. Of course the distance was far larger.

The walls and ceilings had developed cracks and the kitchen floor and kitchen units were sloping. As the movement might be caused by leaking drains or differential settlement, ground investigations will have to take place in order to work out the real cause. Needless to say, in its present state, my clients are unlikely to buy it unless they put aside a large sum of money aside to carry out the necessary repairs.

Andrew R Williams & Associates Ltd,
Chartered Surveyors and Commercial Energy Assessors