Caution: Solicitor at Work

It’s hard to remember that solicitors work for you when they keep dropping anxieties at your door. Only in a German fetish club, or a London taxi, might I also pay someone a large amount of money to give me grief.

It starts with the local authority search. This is built up as a document which will hugely influence your housebuying decision, but all it contains are a series of questions to which the answer is no, like “Are there any current plans to bulldoze the house to the ground and construct a municipal car park?”

Actually, to be accurate, the answer is usually something more like “not as far as aware” or “none at present”. Anything you pay for during the house buying process is heavily caveated. Also of course, local authorities are political institutions and no doubt, having given you the all clear on the search form, will return to their blueprints for constructing a 5 lane motorway through your herbaceous border.

It doesn’t stop there. There’s a Radon Report - radon, that substance that causes terror when mentioned without anyone knowing what it actually is. (Bloke in the pub said Marie Curie died from inhaling it. ) I checked on the government website; it seems most people in the South West give out a pale green glow if you meet them on a dark footpath. A few months in our new house taking deep breaths and we would blend in seamlessly.

Then there was the one we were dreading, the flood report. When we bought our second floor flat, situated at the top of a hill , we got a report identifying us as “medium flood risk”, so we weren’t approaching this one with optimism. And of course, as every Londoner knows, you only need a few hours’ drizzle and the whole of Somerset disappears under 20 feet of water.  To our amazement our new house, despite having a stream running through the garden, has a lower flood risk than our flat.

Should have read the flood report

The chancel report represents a particular quirk of the concept that the church is at the heart of the rural community. “Heart of the community” in this context means when the church needs repairing, expect a bill on your doormat for ten grand or so. You can take out an insurance policy to cover you, though to save money I prefer to draw a pentangle on the front door and dance naked in the garden wearing antlers when I see the vicar coming with his collection box.

All of these reports and documents were familiar from previous house moves. The new one on us was the discovery that an unidentified third party has “mining rights” to the “minerals” beneath the house. What might this portend? Might we return home from Waitrose to find a pithead erected, wheels revolving, by our back door, while horny handed men dripping soot everywhere queued up to use the facilities? Would badgers and moles scuttle for cover as the drills churned into their living rooms?

Mercedes our solicitor seemed rather relaxed about it all. She was of the view that the requirement to obtain planning permission before drilling through our foundations would save us. I wondered though, whether it might depend on what exactly these “minerals” were. Anything that required fracking and we were probably safe. But some sexy new in-demand substance, like lithium (electric car batteries, anyone?) or Californium, the world’s most expensive substance by weight (neutron spectroscopy, but of course you knew that), might surely overturn the local authority’s objections. I made a note to book Swampy to sit in a tree outside the front gate.

"More tea, Vicar?"

Oh, and of course I’m forgetting the survey. Not a legal requirement, but a misery we all put ourselves through when we buy a house. I confess we’d more or less given up on surveys; the litigious age in which we live has rendered them meaningless, so caveated are they (“The overall structure appears sound, but we can’t rule out the possibility that at an unspecified point in the future the UK will go to war with a foreign power who will launch a sonic attack using yet to be developed technology which will weaken the foundations and cause the entire house to collapse”). 

But we were contemplating buying a 200 year old property; that probably meant a full survey. The advantage of a full survey is it’s less caveated. On the other hand it’s generally incomprehensible (“Some corrosion was noted to the fertangling pins in the downbraced substructure forming the eastern end of the foreclosing beam…”).

A former estate agent gave me the best advice on how to deal with a full survey report: “Don’t read it”. To be fair, she did go on to explain that the full report will make it sound like the house is going to fall down, and it’s best to start with the summary, which will just give you the important stuff.

The report arrived. I started at the back, expecting the summary to be there. Instead I was excited to find lots of photos of our new house. I looked through them. Wrong!! I had forgotten: start with the summary. The pictures were of rotting windows, warped door frames, cracked walls. The house was about to fall down!! I pulled back just in time. I found the summary.

Anticlimax alert: all was fine. Some work needed which we came to a deal with the owners about, and some things for us to sort out in time, but the house itself was fundamentally sound. Was that it? Might things all be about to work out?