Stressed out looking for house, contemplating new Persimmon house with issues..

[Cletus Van Damme]

I still live in this house, have done for 2 1/2 years. I don't regret it as it was cheap, the above comment is a concern though. There's a lot of negatives, like my bathroom door frame is like trapezoid or something. Never noticed it when buying it, just several months later whilst lying in the bath, looking at the crazy gaps at the top and bottom of door. The plumbing is mainly plastic Hep2O and some copper at point of use. No thought at all has been put into installing it with regards to replacing faulty items in the future. Its been done as easily as possible for the installer. Replacing a toilet flush and fill valve was a total pain. I haven't a clue how I'm going to replace the kitchen monoblock tap, I'm going to have to replace most of the mess under the sink to do it.

The access to the back garden is terrible, just a really narrow path and U shaped steps making it a total pain if you want to do back garden landscaping for example. I can't get the wheelie bins into the back garden because of said U shaped steps. It's either leave them on the drive or as I do on this narrow path on the side of the house, this just makes it them hard to get past.

The kitchen looks nice, but it's cheap tat, with hardly any storage room. Had to install a different full height cupboard in the kitchen as there was nowhere to put things.

Parking is a joke too as it's an end cul-de-sac with no pavements, short drives. I just have a single car though, would be impossible otherwise.

Having said all that, it was cheap as it was a part exchange against a new build. It's so efficient, which is great considering the price of gas and electric. It's fairly maintenance free, just when it does happen can be a pain as mentioned above.

If I could go back I think I would probably of bought something different. It feels like living in toy town and everybody is on top of each other, due to small front gardens, tiny pavements and a really narrow access road. It's just to cram as many houses in as possible with no thought at all for parking etc.

It's a positive buying one of these houses as the second owner like me, when it was 6 years old, all the snagging points should've been sorted, as I'm sure there would've been loads. To buy one of these houses new, just choosing a plot from this company seems crazy to me. But lots of other housing companies have issues too. They're the cheapest new builds around here, it's for a reason though.

 

[Cletus Van Damme]

I often chat to a neighbour, his son bought a Persimmon new build, detached house in the North East. He's had a lot of issues with it, the main one that I remember is regarding the kitchen. He got all built-in appliances, the dishwasher door could not be opened hardly any distance at all as the door caught on a handle on the oven. How they sorted that I'll have to ask lol..

 

[byegad]

Its common to see houses built smaller in times of property boom.
Plus planners are trying to fill space.
Have you noticed how few car parking spaces new developments have??
Ridiculous ,and a major problem with a growing family when the kids start driving

Our new build estate estate (Gleeson with 130+ houses, built between 2015-2019, we moved in to ours in 2016) has at least one parking space on a drive for each house and most have a decent sized garage. Our 4 bed has room for 2 cars, and you could possibly make that 3 with smaller cars on the drive and we could use the if it wasn't full of bikes and trikes, next door's 4 bed has drive parking for 4 large cars with 5 large cars with the possibility plus the garage. That doesn't mean people don't use the road for parking, but there's room for off road parking for most vehicles. We had some minor snagging done in the first two years, and currently there's a ceiling to wall seam needs replacing as it is peeling off, we had one done under snagging. For the rest so far so good. I do know what people mean about small, we looked at the 2 and 3 bed show houses and some were pokey in the least, but we have an ample living room, large kitchen diner and more toilets than inhabitants, plus 3 good sized bedrooms and effectively a box room as bedroom 4.

 

[sheddy]

Does anyone live in a new build that was designed as a low traffic neighbourhood or with a residents parking scheme or with some other incentive to reduce car use ?

 

[Alex321]

When we moved house 2 years ago, we deliberately chose to rent for a few months, just so that there would be no pressure on us to buy until we found the right house for us.

We actually finished up with our old house AND a rented property for 6 months because the first sale fell through a few days before we expected to complete in May 2019, and it was then December before we actually managed to complete a sale on the old house, but we decided to keep the rental on, as it wasn't easy to find a 4 bed rental with a garage for storage.

We then found the house we wanted and had an offer accepted in January 2020 (about 5 weeks after completion on the old house), and were just about a week from completion on that when the first lockdown hit, and put us back by another 3 months. I'm really glad we were renting, because it removed most of the stress - we knew we had somewhere to live while all this was going on.

 

[Roseland triker]

When houses like these are built they have a 30yr lifespan or so.
What I don't get is how you can get a 30 yrs mortgage on them if there end of life at the end.

It seems you pay for scraping it once you have finished paying.

 

[twentysix by twentyfive]

my bathroom door frame is like trapezoid or something

Is that due to subsidence? Eek! Or just cr&p builders

 

[Roseland triker]

Is that due to subsidence? Eek! Or just cr&p builders

Building is disposable.

 

[welsh dragon]

I wouldn't go near persimmon houses even if they gave them away. Far too many unhappy, distraught customers for my liking.

 

[bikingdad90]

Does anyone live in a new build that was designed as a low traffic neighbourhood or with a residents parking scheme or with some other incentive to reduce car use ?

I live on one of the few greens on my estate of 30k houses. They all have double driveways and speed bumps. As it’s a green lots of kids play on it so neighbours are pretty respectable and careful of young ones.

When houses like these are built they have a 30yr lifespan or so.
What I don't get is how you can get a 30 yrs mortgage on them if there end of life at the end.

It seems you pay for scraping it once you have finished paying.

My house is about 25 years old now and was a new build in 97, apart from needing an internal wall to be reinforced (30 min fire retardant garage door and a chain closure don’t mix with thermoblock garage wall) and new boiler and piping system it’s still going strong. Roof and brickwork is solid. Most retrofit “upgrades” such as dry ridging, uPVC cladding is seen on the latest new builds anyway.

 

[Alex321]

When houses like these are built they have a 30yr lifespan or so.
What I don't get is how you can get a 30 yrs mortgage on them if there end of life at the end.

It seems you pay for scraping it once you have finished paying.

Sorry but that is just rubbish.

They will all have a 20 year guarantee, and would normally expect to last several times that long. 30 years would be ludicrously short lifespan for a house built from breezeblock or bricks with a pitched roof.

Even the prefabs being built n the 50's had an expected lifespan of 25-30 years, and many have lasted much longer - a nephew of mine is still living in one that was built for my parent-in-law in the 50's.

 

[cyberknight]

my tuppence
my house is an ex council house thats solid , former new build had so many issues that we sold at a loss to get out and a month after we left the kitchen ceiling collapsed .We had no end of bother we it and the builders never materialized to fix any of them.
FIL has a corner plot old house that a builder bought part of his land that runs alongside it to create an access road to the estate they built on the back.They extanded the plot lengthways so he gained a longer thinner plot but the wall they built is already crumbling after about 15 years

 

[Roseland triker]

There's some houses here that were built 40yrs ago or so with a view to a 30yr lifespan.

There pretty nackered, damp starting to get in. Timbers breaking down in the roof etc. The council are selling them off now and moving tennents into new builds because of it.
Surely those houses would be non mortgable?

 

[Alex321]

There's some houses here that were built 40yrs ago or so with a view to a 30yr lifespan.

There pretty nackered, damp starting to get in. Timbers breaking down in the roof etc. The council are selling them off now and moving tennents into new builds because of it.
Surely those houses would be non mortgable?

You'd probably still be able to get mortgages on them, but would struggle to get a valuation high enough to cover the cost of remedial work on top of the purchase price.

That is the problem with the council forcing prices artificially low, so the builders can't afford to build to a proper standard.

Though required standards have changed quite a bit in the last 30 years.

 

[Roseland triker]

You'd probably still be able to get mortgages on them, but would struggle to get a valuation high enough to cover the cost of remedial work on top of the purchase price.

That is the problem with the council forcing prices artificially low, so the builders can't afford to build to a proper standard.

Though required standards have changed quite a bit in the last 30 years.

It's certainly a problem here.
I think realistically the whole estate needs nocking down and start again. There pretty ropy.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/118783724#/?channel=RES_BUY

That's very expensive for a nackered damp house. The pictures are nothing like what is there.