Looking at a detached house with cellar/basement built in 1894. Feels like our first grown up house as we’ve always had modern estate houses before.

Our experience of surveyors previously has not been great. Non committal statements of the obvious and lots of buck passing to other “professionals”. Those were homebuyers surveys I think.

As the building is so old, a building survey has been recommended (they would do wouldn’t they). Is it worth it? Have I been unlucky with surveyors in the past or am I better off taking my own trades people around for their opinions?

Unless it’s a screaming bargain that you want to complete on ASAP, I would go full, ‘proper’, structural survey.

I speak from years of experience of buying a total of one house, of a similar age to yours.

I would have still have bought mine at the price I paid for it, but my lord was the ‘normal’ survey as useless as an erection in a library.

We bought our current house of a similar age 10 years ago. We had the standard survey, it was pointless. Apparently the consumer unit was very old. This was because he’d seen the old one from the 1930’s and not noticed the nice new one aboveit. Old one didn’t even have any cables going into it.

Found a few bits if bodging whilst doing it up but they could only be found by taking the house apart. Structurally it’s sound. My theory us that if it was going to fall down it would have by now.

As you say most surveys indemnify themselves so if they miss anything you have no comeback. I’d suggest taking a builder or someone else with some knowledge that you trust. Good luck.

Get a full structural survey but see if you can find a recommended independent. I wouldn’t use one of the surveyors from a big estate agent, as you’ve already seen you just get and endless list of maybes and buck passing.

We’re glad we did on our last purchase he did pick up on a few things we didn’t which saved us a few grand and we got to actually speak to him about it and got a much better feel for things. We ended up using him again as a structural engineer for some steel calcs.