h-l 1: entropy 1

[baratron]

I have been doing battle with entropy. Before you start getting all Second Law of Thermodynamics on me (that's a phenomenally cool geeky link, btw) it's important to work out whether or not our house is a closed system, and how much help entropy gets from absent-minded wuzzies who take things they need to other parts of the house and then forget where they put them. All in all, I think a score of h-l 1: entropy 1 is pretty good - and we're going for best out of 3.

I don't like plumbers. Before you accuse me of unfairly maligning an entire class of hard-working if expensive tradesmen, I should correct that to "I don't like situations that require us to call out plumbers at 8.30 on a Saturday night". Ye-es. Chalk up another point of utter crapness to our house survey and stuff it missed. I think we can't be arsed to try to sue the surveyor (frankly, we have enough complication in our lives without adding more), but I'm certainly going to tell our financial adviser how crap the survey was - and if a large IFA company decide to take their business elsewhere, that could be a major incentive for the surveyors to improve. Maybe. Apparently we might be able to claim for the remedial work that needs to be done on our buildings insurance, but the problem with that is the extent to which a £400ish claim will whack up our premiums next year. Advice not really needed, but I'm sure people will contribute some anyway :)

One of these days we might actually be able to have the house-warming party that we were going to have in June. Argh!

Comments

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

As a compromise between sueing and claiming on insurance, you might want to check the survey documents. With the one I got, they said that if any problems turn up within a year, which they missed in the survey, then they'll pay for the repair costs.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Wow. I don't know whether that is some sort of special deal because your flat is being built from new, so everything is covered by the National HomeBuilders Guarantee (or whatever it's called), or if you just have startlingly competent surveyors. I rather fear the former, which makes it no use for the rest of us :/ Our survey is a mess of hedging which is worth less than the paper it's written on. I'm not joking. Pretty much everything is pointing out the bleeding obvious, they have included something which is so obviously not a problem it's just not true (evidence of woodworm that was treated 20 years ago) and missed a fairly major structural defect which is blatently apparent to anyone who has looked at it.

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Ah, slight misunderstanding there. My building is about 100 years old, with a shop on the ground floor, and two levels of housing above it. The upper two floors were then converted from one residence into two separate flats about 20 years ago. I've had fairly extensive renovations done on it (which are still ongoing!), but that's all subsequent to the surveyor's report, i.e. he was just assessing the prior state of the flat.

So, the guarantee could be something specific to my surveyors (BBG), as a good selling point for them, or standard rules that apply to all surveys nowadays. I guess it can't hurt to ask them about this; they might give you a refund on the original survey cost as a goodwill gesture, or something. I do sympathise though, since it all sounds like a rather unpleasant situation.

The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics

[nmg.livejournal.com]

If you've not seen it, Flanders and Swann's take on the subject.