What should I be asking to be included when reserving the property?

Thinking:

White Goods
Carpets
Curtains
Turf
Fencing
Tiles in bathrooms
Showers
Doorbell

Stamp duty
Legal fees
Moving costs

Bulbs?

Coke, hookers.

A decent standard of finish?
A garden without the sites rubble placed 2″ beneath the “topsoil”
Sensible routing of plumbing pipework
Standard sized kitchen cupboards
a date to move in when the workmen have actually completed the house you’ve just bought and therefore avoiding the hassle of moving in whilst they are still 8 or 9 workmen trying to finish stuff off.

They are they things I wish I’d asked for from Waine Homes.

Turf
Fencing
Tiles in bathrooms
Showers
Doorbell

I can’t believe that’s not included !!

Extra plastering for the cracks to follow post sale?

Flood cover?

Both jokes. No idea.

A lifetime supply of sliced bread?

Seems unclear what is included, but we are assuming nothing so want a big list which the above it giving us…

Turf
Fencing
Tiles in bathrooms
Showers
Doorbell

Are definitely not from what I understand at this stage.

When you say “tiles in bathrooms”

Does that mean that they have installed bathrooms but not tiled them, or that you want the rooms tiled so you can install bathrooms.

Because neither of those options are the right way to do it.

Tuft is sometimes not included but I would expect a fence round the property, even if it’s only at the back. I’ve never seen a new build without tiles in the bathroom, or a shower fitting for that matter. And do you know how cheap doorbells are ? If they are trying to save pennies by not supplying door bells (which I can’t believe) I would worry about where else they’ve been trying to save pennies.

Ask to be allowed to have a £20K retention, payable when they have put right all the stuff that will be wrong with your house.
Ask them to pay you £30/hour for any time you need spend writing to them and chasing them up to get jobs redone to a reasonable standard after you have moved in.

If they won’t agree to the above, walk away, as they can’t be confident the house will be OK and/or sorted in any reasonable timescale – or you might be lucky.
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Note: I have bought 3 ‘new builds’ in the past 🙁

After seeing many many brand new homes I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would buy one. Nasty cheap tacky builds and everything in them put in at minimum cost with maximum speed. Shoddy workmanship, cheap materials and so many things not even straight/level.

You think houses become better as they get older ?

The shoddy workmanship suddenly gets better, cheap materials are replaced, and things straighten out and become level ?

Electricity supply to garage
Gas/electric fire in living room (doubt they’ll run to a woodburner 🙂 )
Non-exploding showers and plumbing that’s actually plumbed in so that the bath doesn’t empty straight into the kitchen 🙄

Houses, for the price you pay, should be built to a good standard and straight. They should start out good, and not need work doing to them to make them good.

My grandad was a foreman bricklayer and took pride in his work, as did the people he worked for. Unfortunately the greedy house builders all nowadays want to squeeze as many houses onto a small a plot of land as possible and erect their shoddy little boxes with no consideration to quality and longevity. There are exceptions of course, but given a choice of building better or taking more profit they’ll choose the latter everytime.

The crazy thing is that the new houses attract a premium!!!! Why??

the greedy house builders all nowadays want to …..

When did “nowadays” start ?

A decent standard of finish?
A garden without the sites rubble placed 2″ beneath the “topsoil”
Sensible routing of plumbing pipework
Standard sized kitchen cupboards
a date to move in when the workmen have actually completed the house you’ve just bought and therefore avoiding the hassle of moving in whilst they are still 8 or 9 workmen trying to finish stuff off.

They are they things I wish I’d asked for from Waine Homes.

Ha , sounds like my parents experience when they bought a new Bovis home in Bristol 29 years ago.l

When did “nowadays” start ?

Straight after the good ole days

I am still in an obviously gerrybuilt inter war semi I bought 10 years ago it is faux Bauhaus and suffers from a flat roof , rendered walls ,And a frankly eclectic selection of building materials including cinderblock that seems less structurally solid than weetabix. It is still better built than the new build I bought off plan 23 years ago.

Carpentry included kitchen cupboards screwed to walls with silicon sealant instead of rawplugs . the stairs and banisters were out of line so all the tongue and groove joints had been sawn off and the flush ends just glued . massive cracks developed in the cealing .One wrong kitchen unit painted to match the others in the hope we would not notice. Electrics wired so left switch worked right light fiting . neighboring property the electrics were for a right hand house but the property was a left so the circuit breaker was over the window in the living room instead of boxed in in the hall .

Get a snagging retention.

After seeing many many brand new homes I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would buy one. Nasty cheap tacky builds and everything in them put in at minimum cost with maximum speed. Shoddy workmanship, cheap materials and so many things not even straight/level.

^this.
Built to a profit, not a good standard.
The *only* advantage I can see at the moment is that they *should* be a lot warmer with new regs.

Friend of a friend bought a new build, they negotiated a fence around the garden, unfortunately instead of running a bulldozer across the rear gardens for 10 minutes, they dug a few trenches to put the fence at the correct height and left several tons of rubble/washed out cement/mortar piled between the fences.

I gather it took a lot of barrowing through the house to get rid of it all so they could turf it after moving in.

Housing development building sites are soul-less places; where re numeration is based on quantity, not quality.

And will probably continue to be so whilst people keep buying a new house. Unfortunately, in the UK, we have few affordable choices or alternatives.

We have friends who bought a 4 bed town house off plot about 3 years ago. Since moving in, they’ve had two years of grief, as have many many people on the same development. I’m taking £30k-£40k of snags; replastering of all walls in all rooms, new ceilings, flood damage, part replaced kitchen, new carpets, 2 complete replacements of walk-in shower units, replacement windows and more. Yet they love it. All the more weird because theirs, like all the other homes on the plot, have kitchens with fully glazed frontages onto the pavement literally inches away. And gardens the size of a dining table.

good luck with your ‘demands’ if our experience of redrow is anything to go buy you ll be told to go off and reproduce.

natural settlemet is there response to cracks, not our problem when the ridge tiles fell off every home on the estate. fences, not included, grass not included, doorbell not included.. the the serious stuff vertical walls, not included, square corners, not included. add to which purcahsers cannot have satalite dishes sheds caravans vans..

It’s cheap foreign labour doing decent hard working Irish actors out of a job !

I wouldn’t buy a new build if they paid me. But if I did I would want a contract that handed me their nuts on a plate if there was a single thing wrong.

whimbrel – Member
Ask to be allowed to have a £20K retention, payable when they have put right all the stuff that will be wrong with your house.
Ask them to pay you £30/hour for any time you need spend writing to them and chasing them up to get jobs redone to a reasonable standard after you have moved in.

If they won’t agree to the above, walk away, as they can’t be confident the house will be OK and/or sorted in any reasonable timescale – or you might be lucky.
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Note: I have bought 3 ‘new builds’ in the past

+ 100

What totalshell says.

We have a couple we are friends with who asked how we can be bothered to refurb and such like our 1950s farmers cottage.

They bought new build and were proud of how little work it was going to need when they moved in

Then they moved in and found only a thin basecoat on walls , no floor coverings , no turf/grass/topsoil and a single slab path round the house.

The only diference between us is they dont have to remove the old wallpaper and skim before painting.

A decent boiler cus chances are the one they’ve put in is shite.

Cavity trays
Weep holes
Right angles
Plumb brickwork

Best of luck 🙄

If it makes you feel any better, I’ve lived in some old houses that were shockingly badly made too. A Victorian terrace that had walls so thin you could follow conversations in the next house. By contrast, in this “shoddy” new build we hardly hear a sound from the neighbours.

Can’t believe the stuff you mentioned in the first post isn’t standard!
Recently bought a new build from Redrow and all was included.

Other extras I got them to add we’re outside tap, outside power sockets, security light on garage at end of the drive.
Upgraded to a halogen hob instead of gas and extra tv aerial points.

worked in many new houses, one with a laminated floor kitchen,somebody had kicked the side off a kitchen unit where the washing machine would fit,screw sticking out,huge groove accross the floor,guttering running away from the downspout,and a loft hatch above the bed in the main bedrom as well as one above the staircase.

another house had 3 seperate staricases fitted,customer requested varnished wood, so they put in a painted one,customer went to work after long argument, builders cameback and replaced staircase with new varnished staircase, new carpets fitted, then a few weeks later painters came in and painted staircase white, lots of fluff from new carpet on newly painted staircase.

another house, plastic manhole cover on drive,drive unfinished till estate was completed,so sticking above the ground level, i accidently fellover it carrying a door, and my mate following nearly fell down hole.

New bathroom put in, the plumber forgot to connect the waste to the bath, customer had bath and pulled plug,entire contents of bath ended up in the kitchen.

New house you flushed the toilet and cistern filled with hot water from the boiler.

New estate master keys copied and given to resident, they got broken into , keys stolen and 6 houses got into with master key.

Some snags are obvious and some come to light weeks latter.Either way they have your cash

All the stuff already mentioned…

But even more importantly

Hot and cold outside taps for Bike washing!

New house you flushed the toilet and cistern filled with hot water from the boiler.

That is amazing 😯

I would be asking for what some have mentioned above regarding a snagging retention.
Pretty much everyone I have known who bought a new build have all said the amount of snagging needed was ridiculous.

Bovis you say? A soul, a conscience.

Well if you’re going to ask for unrealistic things you might as well think big.

Hot and cold outside taps for Bike washing!

I already worked out our new (secondhand) house has a utility with outside wall and pipes already to tap(!) into to attain this. Priorities, priorities.

Funnily enough, some friends of ours have just bought a new build and called round today as they’re now quite nearby. We’ve not seen them since they’ve moved in.’

He was showing me the garden. It’s actually just a piece of building site that they’ve run a bulldozer over before fencing it off. I’d say it will take half a year of weekends spent trying to get it free of rubble and somewhere approaching level.

They’re still building the remaining houses on the estate, and it borders right onto the path along which I often walk the dog, so this evening I had a nosey past the barriers to see what’s going on. On the basis of what I saw, I’ll not be buying a new build any time soon, and by soon, I mean whilst I’m alive.

I forgot one one of our neighbours bought a tree when he went to plant it he discovered a full pallet of bricks under his ”garden.”