A New Build Nightmare – Part 1

Whenever you mention new build homes, most people have something to say about them. The anecdotal, “They don’t build them like the used to,” blah blah blah, gets thrown around a lot. Everyone seems to reckon that new build homes are made of cardboard and chewing gum, cobbled together with shoddy craftsmanship and terrible finishing. Before I get into the meat of this piece, I’d like to first testify on behalf of the new build, despite the fact that I have every reason to take the other side in the argument. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no great dividing line between good and bad properties that can be drawn perhaps somewhere down the middle of the nineties, or maybe even the early 2000’s. There have always been well-built houses and poorly built houses; the quality of the build has nothing to do with the decade in which the build took place, but rather, whoever undertook the build in the first place. “They don’t build them like they used to,” is in exactly the same vein as, “The youth of today...” People have been complaining about young people for all of recorded history, and I imagine that people have been complaining about new buildings for equally as long. The reality is, if anything, with ever tightening building restrictions, newer modern materials, and better safety and environmental standards, new builds in theory should be better than ever, not to mention the fact that the average size of a new build has been steadily increasing over time, contrary to popular opinion.

Now, with my argument in favour of new builds out of the way, time to utterly dismantle it with evidence (although anecdotal) to the contrary.

In January 2020, my partner and I completed purchase of our first house. We went for a new build for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the government help-to-buy scheme allowed us to get a mortgage without an obscene deposit; that scheme was, and still is, exclusive to new builds. Secondly, whilst yes, there is a bit of a premium that you pay for buying a brand spanking new home, you essentially get it under warranty; if there’s an issue, you aren’t paying to fix it yourself. And whilst you probably want to decorate when you move in, you don’t need to renovate. There are no new kitchens or bathrooms to install, and there’s no horrible discovery that you need to completely replace your central heating system, or rewire the whole house. Whilst arguably there are older homes that need little doing to them, the chances are, if you are buying a home on a limited budget, there will always be some significant expense post purchase. Finally, with a new build, you don’t have to live in what can effectively become a building site whilst works to the property are being carried out... or so I thought. (You can probably see where this is going!)

So, January 2020, we move in following a fairly stressful purchasing process; I don’t really want to talk about it, so let’s just sum it all up with me telling you that I now have a deep-seated hatred for solicitors that will probably stick with me until the day I die!  But, we got there—we’d made it, the house was ours. The day after we move in, the boiler packs up. Oh dear. Its January, we have no heating, no hot water, and I believe it is a Sunday, so... no engineer. However, fortunately the housing development is still under construction; it’s a two phased build, and phase two is mid-way through. That means the site officer lives down the road. We drop him a text, he sorts us out, lets us use the shower in the unsold house next door until they get an engineer out to fix the boiler. The engineer turns up at the earliest appointment, warns us that the part that has packed in isn’t something he stocks in the van, but fortunately, we’ve got the keys to next door, which has the same boiler; I make the sneaky suggestion that he goes one house over and ransacks the boiler for the desired component, and with the site officer’s consent, we get the hot water flowing again. Problemo solved, no biggy. But, then the kitchen extractor trips the electrics, a few days later giving up the ghost completely. Oh yeah, also the control panel on our washing machine was actually broken the day we moved in.

Not too long passes before we get these kitchen hiccoughs solved. Then the dishwasher decides it hates life and would rather spew water across the kitchen floor than actually do anything useful. Also, the extractor fan in our en-suite bathroom has just died a death. Through the array of workmen and engineers who keep dropping by to fix the medley of malfunctions and breakages, we start to get the full story. The original developers of the housing estate went bust before completing phase one; we already knew this, given that we saw the housing estate come to a standstill for quite a period before we actually decided on even buying a house. However, what we hadn’t discovered was that the houses had all been sat more or less finished for over a year before the new developer took over the project. Therefore, all of the white goods which had been installed prior to the first developer’s insolvency had expired warranties. As a result, it was up to the current developers to replace everything at their own cost. Furthermore, the make of the majority of the white goods, Iberna (an Italian off-branch of Hoover) is pretty much as cheap and as terrible as they come! Turns out, countless washing machines, dishwashers, and the like across the entire estate, were breaking left right and centre, becoming the bane of homeowners and the developers alike.

Whatever, I guess; it’s annoying and it’s an inconvenience every time something breaks, but at least we’re not paying for the repairs, whereas if this weren’t a new build and we had the same luck, it would have been an expensive couple of months.

By the time we got through the third extractor fan in the en-suite, each of which had failed because they had become filled with water through condensation, the developers came to the conclusion that, instead of it being located directly above the shower, it should be moved one foot over to above the toilet. I was unconvinced that such would solve the issue (inevitably being proved right) and suggested that maybe the installation of a window that could actually be opened, or at the very least some trickle vents above the sealed glazing, might be a better solution. But hey, what do I know!?

Anyway, by this stage, we are getting danger close to a global pandemic. Lock down is mere weeks away, but a few more issues are starting to emerge. We have a damp patch downstairs, clearly a leak from the guest bathroom from when my future mother-in-law came to stay, and also, there’s the beginning of mould in both the master bedroom and the en-suite.

You can probably guess what comes next: March 2020, the end of the world is seemingly taking place, there’s a lot of uncertainty over whether or not we’ll ever see a roll of toilet paper ever again, the developers and building contractors flee in panic from site. Lockdown takes place. Things go very quiet. But, eventually, after a couple months of hibernation, the country starts to reawaken from its Odinsleep. Unfortunately, the development does not.

Boris tells everyone to go back to work if you can’t from home, and last time I checked, housing construction wasn’t exactly something you could do over Zoom. For whatever reason, the work across the road never resumes. The world is returning to the new normal but the site on our estate is a ghost town.

We do a bit of digging; it turns out, prior to us moving in (like, literally a couple of weeks beforehand) there was a pay dispute between the construction company and the developers over Christmas bonuses. The result of which was the builders putting tools down for a couple of weeks right at the start of January in protest. All of this means that, when both the construction company and the developers were plunged into sudden financial difficulty by the looming end of the world, our estate was the first site the builders pulled out of in order to focus their attention and resources elsewhere.

So, across the road, there were (and still are) about thirty odd houses that were pretty much abandoned half-built. The estate is all timber-built; a dozen houses were left with their first floor and roof trusses exposed to the elements for over eighteen months, all of which now is currently being stripped out and replaced as I write this. One house in particular was about a metre and a half of roofing slates from being made weather tight before it was abandoned; for the sake of a few hours work from one or two roofers (all of whom had no requirement to stop working back during lockdown) a heck of a lot of water damage could probably have been avoided.

Anyway, none of this was really of any importance to us; sure, we live opposite an abandoned building site that was supposed to be a finished housing estate a year ago, but it means the estate is kind of quiet, and our views of the surrounding fields and hillsides is mostly uninterrupted, so I don’t really mind. What is of importance is that none of the snags we had were getting sorted.

And so, to the rescue comes a subcontracted construction company. The site officer still lives down the road, and we (by which I mean my partner) have started making a fair bit of noise; as a result, the developers have agreed to hire in outside help to get shit done! We have a guy come in and survey all the work that’s needed—he walks around, listens to our qualms, does some tutting at the issues, offers a fair bit of reassurance, and leaves with the promise that he’ll get everything sorted. Hooray! Looks like we’re getting somewhere!

A short time later, and the works are underway. They have a bit of an issue tracing the leak in the bathroom, but they get there eventually. A lot of the snags are touched up and made good, and with another en-suite extractor fan in the bathroom having died a death, there are whisperings about maybe coming up with a proper solution to the unopenable window situation. For a very short time, things seem to be going okay. But remember that mould I told you about in the bedroom window? Yeah, about that…

So, the mould has gotten worse. Now, we heat the house properly, we have the trickle vents open, and we frequently open windows to air out the rooms a bit. But this mould around the inside of the window reveals and creeping up along the pitched section of the bedroom ceiling is starting to ring some alarm bells. An inspection is carried out, and… holy Christ, where is the bloody insulation!? Like, seriously, every single room in the upstairs is missing insulation for about a quarter of the ceiling where it is pitched beneath the roof.

They break the bad news: they are going to have to rip out said section of ceiling in each room, put the legally required insulation in place, then reboard, replaster, and repaint each of those sections… in every room upstairs. Now, to me, this doesn’t exactly strike me as minor works—it seems fairly substantial. They assure us that it will all be done within a week, and that yes, we would have to move around the rooms upstairs a little bit, shuffling between the guest bedroom and the main bedroom, between the two bathrooms etc. but they would be as considerate as possible and it wouldn’t be a massive inconvenience.

I knew it would be an inconvenience—hell, I knew it was going to be a bloody ball ache! And it was. But it was far worse than that! But you’ll hear all about that in the next post.