British Homes - The embarrassing truth

Cleisthenes said:
Think I misread your OP as I had thought that this was due to be your third!
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No, although our first house wasn't old, we purchased off a couple who split up. They were desperate to sell, and took a low offer. Just very lucky timing on our part, especially since it was just before the boom.
God knows what would have happened had we not got on the property ladder. That house tripled in value in seven years. No wonder first time buyers struggle. We paid £46k for it lol
 
stuman said:
The government needs to sort something out. Most people wanting to self build will also be looking to build very efficient housing and yet here we are with them propping up mega developers who refuse to innovate (given, they can’t get their current product right!).

I’m not sure how it would work, maybe a tax exemption if you build and live in it for 5 years
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This is already the case - you pay no capital gains on your primary residence, so if you lived it in (arguably for any length of time) and then sold it, then it is CGT free.
 
stuman said:
didn’t know that! Still, need to find £100000 though!

I’ll take donations!
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Yeah unfortunately you either need to get the land for free or have about £100k in cash or self building isn't really a possibility for most :(

A lad i used to work with was lucky enough to get a scrap of land for free from a family member, it's not in an ideal location but it's made it possible for him to self build as a single lad in his late 20's with a very normal size deposit.
 
sovietspybob said:
Yeah unfortunately you either need to get the land for free or have about £100k in cash or self building isn't really a possibility for most :(

A lad i used to work with was lucky enough to get a scrap of land for free from a family member, it's not in an ideal location but it's made it possible for him to self build as a single lad in his late 20's with a very normal size deposit.
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Belfast maybe? Fairly common out there apparently.
 
I've had a look at land prices, and they aren't much cheaper than actually buying a house on some land :eek:

although I have come across 1 acre in a great location for £125k. It's an old paddock at the back of a row of houses. I guess the risk is not getting the required planning permission.
 
Scuzi said:
I specced Cat 5a cable to be installed in most rooms. Faceplates terminated at a patch panel in one of the closets. The spark who wired it up was so incompetent, he wired the faceplates up in series. Like a token ring.
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Haha, this amused me - we moved into ours a few months ago and I'd done exactly as you and they'd done exactly the same thing. The electrician had to come back and rewire the whole lot. Absolutely incredible :D

Fair play to the developer - they ensured it was immediately fixed - but just how does it happen? How can anyone who knows what a Cat5e cable is wire it up like that?!

Unfortunately, the same guy wired up all the coax cable for the TV's. Which isn't brilliant either...
 
[TW]Fox said:
Haha, this amused me - we moved into ours a few months ago and I'd done exactly as you and they'd done exactly the same thing. The electrician had to come back and rewire the whole lot. Absolutely incredible :D

Fair play to the developer - they ensured it was immediately fixed - but just how does it happen? How can anyone who knows what a Cat5e cable is wire it up like that?!

Unfortunately, the same guy wired up all the coax cable for the TV's. Which isn't brilliant either...
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Maybe it was the same guy! We opted to only get some of them fixed to avoid some walls being punched through and took their generous offer of compensation for the remaining connections that were not remedied.
 
Scuzi said:
Maybe it was the same guy! We opted to only get some of them fixed to avoid some walls being punched through and took their generous offer of compensation for the remaining connections that were not remedied.
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Poor chap who buys your house next lol. I think a similar thing happened here, thought I'd hit the jacket pot with TV antennas in the built in cupboards but they are all dead. :p
 
To be fair when i asked for my house to have around 20 CAT6 points put in everyone looked at me as if i had just come straight from mars.. i didn't think it was that weird of a request nowadays but apparently it was!

I made sure all the sparky did was run the cables from the back boxes in each room back to the utility room and i terminated all the points in the rooms and patch panel myself as I've seen how normal electricians terminate data cabling in work and it's not pretty..

Thinking about it im sure i did have to confirm that each point needed a cabling running all the way back so there were 20x runs of cable.. they were probably thinking about daisy chaining them now you've all said that!
 
TheOracle said:
It wasn't that long ago that Britain was well known for it's high quality, well built homes.
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We were? I remember a long time ago hearing about how the germans et al were much better than us for things like all houses have to be double glazed by law and all new builds are routinely triple glazed. We have or had old fashioned weighty water tanks in the loft whereas everyone else simply had pumps that fed everything directly off the rising main. Etc.
 
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