I've just been told I might have an issue in my basement. Thing is I didn't know I had one.
Should I have known, was it up to me to find this out when I bought it?
It's a converted pub, now four freehold houses. My neighbors was sold with a basement that had been renovated as a full time living space.
However two years ago it flooded, and recently it was stripped back to reveal a partially blocked basement under my house.
Is this a case of buyer beware, or should I have been informed of a blocked off basement.
I'll find out what the issue is this Sunday, not lived there myself for over a year.
I'm pretty sure there is a void under my house - there was under all the others being build, and the concrete floor downstairs resonates when you stamp on it. Tempted to drill a hole in the floor and stick a camera down there.
Any bodies down there?
didnt fred west own a pub...
didnt fred west own a pub…
Yeah, but that sold and converted into flats when it closed down.
.
Oh...
Friday.....don't expect any helpful answers on a Friday
You describe a problem, I read an opportunity.
Man cave
Cinema Room
Zwift room
Workshop
Gym
Wine Cellar
Sex Dungeon
Who do you expect would tell you?
Most pubs have a cellar.
Whats the problem?
Though my place is listed in Bedfordshire Ghosts.
Sex Dungeon
Given the OP presumably doesn't have any access to this basement but next door look like they do, might be a bit awkward popping next door in your leather chaps with your todger hanging out and an 8-ball in your mouth mumbling something about getting access to your basement.
this (probably ALL older ones!)Most pubs have a cellar.
Would love a house with a cellar, don't know why, just seems cool. We did view an old house that had one, but it was immediately veto'd unfortunately, due to the proliferation of spiders and ghosts (seriously 🤣).
don’t expect any helpful answers on a Friday
You knows it!
Without access... is it a cellar, or just a void? Has it been "blocked up", or has it never had a door for access? If it wasn't part of the sale, is it yours? A thousand questions open up before you. Get it "completely" sealed off from your neighbours, and checked out for foundation damage.
due to the proliferation of spiders and ghosts (seriously 🤣).
There is a mate of mine has a wife who is originally from Thailand.
When she was selling a house she was asked if it had a ghost, apparently a selling feature!
Basements / cellars are fantastic. Our last house had one, and it was a non negotiable requirement when looking for this house (quite common to have them in our town).
We have a guest bedroom down there, which we usually decant to when it gets hot in the summer.
Bedfordshire ghosts? Anywhere near Clophill Church then? Might be able to relocate them
On a serious note though. You need to build a climbing wall in it
Man cave
Cinema Room
Zwift room
Workshop
Gym
Wine Cellar
Sex Dungeon
All of the above?
Would love a house with a cellar, don’t know why, just seems cool.
Because it literally is! 😉
It's a cellar, not a cavern!
Now that would be epic... Opening up a floor to find a cave system underneath. it would be like "Evolution", but in suburbia.
In a previous job I looked after a large town house converted into student accommodation, when the house was vacated I was given a bunch of keys and told to make good any damage and redecorate.
Unlocked a what I thought was a storage cupboard under the stairs to find a rolladisco in the basement look untouched for years, glitter ball and a crate of cherry-B covered in dust.
My parents house was a pub that's now divided into three houses, the cellar only extends under two of them though so not guaranteed that all houses that are converted from pubs have cellars
Man cave
Cinema Room
Zwift room
Workshop
Gym
Wine Cellar
Sex Dungeon
All of the above?
Isn't that an Attic ??
I looked at a house that had a cave.
It was into sandstone on two side and at the back had a space about a meter and a half as a semi circle that was two stories high.
Mostly it was full of spiders, but it would have been the most amazing climbing wall or wine cellar 🙂
Just because it's under your house doesn't mean it's yours I'm afraid. There's a good chance if it belongs to anyone it belongs to the neighbours who have the (blocked) access door.
It’s a cellar, not a cavern!
Now that would be epic… Opening up a floor to find a cave system underneath.
Why hope to find one - anyone can have a cave system under their house if they want one 🙂
If it's a converted pub, maybe that's where the Boddies have been buried?
So here's a curious thing. My house is two (smallish) terraces converted into one. The basement footprint is just one of those, half of the house. And the adjoining wall is non-matching brick rather than stone. The attic space is the same.
It's only partner disapproval preventing me from digging out a 4lb lump hammer and a cold chisel, I am desperately curious.
On a serious note though. You need to build a climbing wall in it
Have you seen the height of cellars? I'm not excessively tall and I have to duck.
Isn’t that an Attic ??
👏👏 And the crowd goes wild.
Cellars are great, it's like a garage, for bikes, but more secure and your OH won't want to fill it with other bulky stuff because there's stairs, or other stuff because they're always slightly damp.
We have a guest bedroom down there, which we usually decant to when it gets hot in the summer.
I think that's covered by the sex dungeon suggestion?
Just because it’s under your house doesn’t mean it’s yours I’m afraid. There’s a good chance if it belongs to anyone it belongs to the neighbours who have the (blocked) access door.
IANAL but if the neighbours owned it then yours would be listed as a leasehold or flying freehold surely?
Plenty of old houses have doors linking them.
Isn’t that an Attic ??
Well played!
There was a lower flat for sale down here that I really wanted, it covered half the ground floor but had the entire basement area included in the sale. None of it was habitable, presumably because fire regs but you basically got two other houses for free.
In Hackney?
Mole Mans house
I just went looking for that, but got distracted reading an article on the Vogue Magazine website detailing how it has now been turned in to an artist's studio, and you beat me to it.
From his Wikipedia page
"After this, Lyttle was moved to a hotel for three years, before being rehoused in an apartment in a high-rise building. He was put on the top floor, to discourage tunnelling. While there he knocked a hole in a dividing wall between two rooms."
here was a lower flat for sale down here that I really wanted, it covered half the ground floor but had the entire basement area included in the sale. None of it was habitable, presumably because fire regs but you basically got two other houses for free.
I basically bought two flats for the price of one.
We looked at a house for sale in Matlock that literally had a cavern entrance in the garden. Not a small cave, the sort of cavern people go into with helmets, ropes and lights.
The previous owners had allowed some sort of permissive access, which sounded like a legal nightmare to me! 🙂
...also at our old house I accidentally discovered that we had a mostly rubble filled cellar when I broke a floorboard in the space under the stairs. That was pretty cool 🙂
Man cave
Cinema Room
Zwift room
Workshop
Gym
Wine Cellar
Sex Dungeon
He said it flooded, so add indoor pool to the list.
Our house has a cellar. We use it every day and knew about it when we bought it. However it wasn’t until lockdown 1 when we ripped up the hall tiles and @p20 decided to get a screw driver to see what was under the floor boards, did we find out we had a second cellar (or more accurate as posed above ‘a void’) under the front of the house, behind what appears a very solid wall in our current cellar. I’d certainly not expected a surveyor to go ripping up floorboards to check (even though some of the other houses on the street do have known full length cellars - just depends where on the hill you are!).
[strong][/strong] wrote:
Now that would be epic… Opening up a floor to find a cave system underneath. it would be like “Evolution”, but in suburbia.
Happened in Germany when I lived there and was active in the local caving club. While building a garage a cave system was discovered which has become one of the deepest in the area. To enter the cave you have to move the car out of the garage and go down a manhole in the concrete floor. Links shows a plan and second one a picture of it being made secure.
Tory Sex Dungeon
FIFY
I’m no property lawyer but I’d say if you share a piece of building above or below your property with another residence then you should have a leasehold agreement going on and thus it should be something you are ‘aware’ of. It depends whether your conveyancer got copies of the deeds of the other properties as to whether you’d actually see the existence of a basement. Albeit even then I doubt it Would be clear whether your property was above said basement as the plans tend to be 2d for each floor but you could have a guess based on their shape.
I was involved in the Combe Down stone mines project. There was a pub, that had a trapdoor...in the floor of its cellar into the stone mines..
It was reportedly europe's (or maybe) the world's largest consumer of foamed concrete whilst we filled in all the mines under the village.
Isn’t that an Attic ??
👏👏 And the crowd goes wild.
... then they atac.
Little update.
It's like a cavern, so no timbers absolutely no way to access it. I'd have to tunnel down though several feet of ground to get to it.
Looks like next doors cellar shouldn't have been converted to a dwelling space. But that's what they want to do again.
Question is. Should I have to spend thousands on mine when it doesn't effect me at all, and isn't the source of their flooding.
It's 160 year old pub converted, with a history of a flooding cellar. The old high pressure pipes are still there that would have been connected to pumps.
To recap. They have a full height cellar with limited access. And in their cellar is a small bricked up passage into a very small vaulted cellar that sits partially under my house.
Anyway. Spoken to a solicitor and specialist company.
As an aside I don't think I've ever lived in a house that doesn't have a cellar, even in my student days renting.
Current cellar houses my snake collection 🙂
OP You are Rosemarie Fritzl AICMFP.
Confused. Who is asking you to spend money and why?
Can you not just ask them to kindly brick it back up and get out of your property...?
Of maybe you could ask them for money... they could rent the extra space off you.
They seem to think that 'if I do something' it'll stop flooding. Chances are it'll pop up elsewhere. Maybe make there's worse.
I'm just spouting a bit really.
First step is to find out for sure who owns it.
I'd say if you want to sort my cellar out crack on. At your expense
This is slow.
Found the plans the developer used, it shows the small vault under my place accessed through the neighbours 'proper' cellar
It says steps on the plans where the two join. However the developer sealed it up and boarded over the lot. So basically hid it.
Rather strangely they put a fluorescent light in there?
Weird and annoying. If it was under my floor I could do something, but it's under my foundations.
Solicitors Monday I think.
We built an extension that crossed some ancient water course and caused neighbours cellar to flood. It was obvious and immediate, so we paid for a sump pump installed in their cellar, all happy.
Just you owning a cellar doesn’t make you responsible for anything, and it could be the development of the buildings that has caused it, or if it’s always flooded then that’s that.
I wouldn’t spend money on a lawyer unless they do. They need to drop a pump in at their cost and stop whining.
I worked with a guy in Sweden who literally had a cellar blown out of the rock his house was built on. Real expensive, real explosives but an amazing project. It featured on some kind of Swedish Grand Designs type program, I told him I would have just moved!
Who turned a cellar into dwelling space?
They did.
In what way are you responsible for the cellars not being suitable for conversion to dwelling space?
Zero.
Er..don't want to sound like the boring practical one but first job surely is determine where the water is getting in?
Ok, now that's out of the way, it's probably normal to check old pubs for basements, presumably the door is long gone, lets go with that, first job is examine around the bottom of the outside wall, clear any built up garden from the foundation and make sure the ground level is below vents etc. I once viewed a house with horrific damp problems, guy selling it had split up from his wife over it, they had spend £50k renovating it and not noticed that someone had concreted over the drain and right up to air brick level, every time it rained his house filled up with water, it even had a broken downpipe to help fill it up quicker, 2 hours with a Kango hammer and a wheel barrow was all it needed.
Might be beer down there, or stuff, basements always have cool old stuff.
basements always have cool old stuff.
Don’t think Fred West’s did.
"Don’t think Fred West’s did"
Depends on your point of view, Fred thought it had cool stuff
Place must have been minging, I put a bit of chicken in the food waste bin once, that was enough for me, just not cut out for the whole serial killer thing.
Problem is my neighbour is ####ing dim. In her last email, she asks why I can't simply put a ladder down there.
That means digging a tunnel down then under the foundations, through the vault/cellar and installing a pump after making it all safe. She is a bit annoyed I've not simply done this!
On top of that it's grade 2 listed, she doesn't seem to understand you can't even paint the place a slightly different colour.
I'm sort of interested in how they divided up the freehold. It was a pub so one freehold, developed into four houses each with freehold.
First I can't believe a vault/cellar could be simply hidden then not shown on my deeds.
We looked at a house for sale in Matlock that literally had a cavern entrance in the garden. Not a small cave, the sort of cavern people go into with helmets, ropes and lights.
The previous owners had allowed some sort of permissive access, which sounded like a legal nightmare to me! 🙂
Not a cave system, but a roof. But what a roof. When I was a student at Univ College Durham, the main building for the college is Durham Castle, which has student rooms (I still can't believe I lived for a year in Durham Castle)
All the rooms were different and some had 'features' that when you bid for the room on the allocations list in your third year you were made aware of by the previous occupant. The feature on mine was a small window which led out onto the roof of the castle, officially as a fire escape and absolutely and definitely not to be used for sitting out on on summer evenings after dark, or sunbathing. Penalty being expelled, probably, but I think a bit of a blind eye was turned.
The room was well known for this feature so it was a relatively common occurrence for my door to be knocked on and someone asking if they could climb over my desk and out of the window. If you couldn't live with that you shouldn't have taken the room basically. It was OK in the day time, and I got to meet lots of people from college as a result. Evenings could be a bit tiresome but it was just a thing, I used to let people out but ask them to be quiet when they came back through and I'd just go back to bed.
Ah ha.
Think I've found a covenant. It's a bit legalese, but it looks like we all have the right within reason to enter adjoining property to gain access to repair and maintain our properties. And it mentions foundations.
So could I read that as being able to access their cellar so I can walk into mine and switch on a sump pump. They have an external cellar hatch out of which the water could be pumped?
Tell them you want access to fill it with concrete if it's your property
Was a thought
Bit baffled as to why you're still considering paying for a sump pump - you've stated that your bit isn't the source of the flooding. Even if it is, surely it's up to them to install a pump, or resurrect the original system which you mentioned?
Ah ha.
Think I’ve found a covenant. It’s a bit legalese, but it looks like we all have the right within reason to enter adjoining property to gain access to repair and maintain our properties. And it mentions foundations.So could I read that as being able to access their cellar so I can walk into mine and switch on a sump pump. They have an external cellar hatch out of which the water could be pumped?
I'm a bit baffled, how do you know there is water in the basement if you have not been in it? then further bafflement..if you got contractors in to deal with anything in the basement they would have to gain access wherever it is, via neighbour or whatever anyway, it's quite normal.
But why can't you just open your floor and stick a torch/ladder down? if you have floor boards just run a saw across 4, then same again to form a square, and lift those out, you can stick them back in after.
Also a pump will only remove lying water, you still need to stop the water coming in, in most cases this would be an emergency.
It’s not under his floor, it’s under the ground.
Surely if you have no direct access and would have to dig through several feet of earth to reach the "cavern" then it's not yours.
That's like saying a mineshaft under your house is your responsibility.
It's been blocked up and only access is from next door you had no knowledge of it and it's not in your deeds then I can't see how it's your responsibility.
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If you don't have access to something is it yours? has to be in title deeds?
If it is yours, and your responsibility, you will have legal access, this will be in your deeds(terms and conditions)
If they 'boarded it up' is the boarded up bit in your house?
If it's under the ground(I'm not clear on the 'under the ground/boarded up thing) and you don't have access in your deeds it's not yours.
But who's is it, did the developer perhaps just try to lose it? because it had dampness issues from an old hard ground foundation and they didn't want to spend on a concrete skin?
Fascinating stuff, any pictures?
If it was under my floor I could do something, but it’s under my foundations.
Trying to unravel this, I have some building knowledge, a cellar is part of the foundations, if it were under the foundations you have a cave..or something.
It's quite normal to have a cellar that is accessible via an adjoining house/part of house/flat, bit like shared attic space in a two story house..you have to go into the upstairs house to access what is effectively your shared plumbing, roof and so on, this will be stated clearly in your deeds, I think you say it is.
If there is a hatch you can stick a hose out of can you not just access it from that?
Problem is my neighbour is ####ing dim. In her last email, she asks why I can’t simply put a ladder down there.
the problem is you are communicating with your next door neighbour by email.
Found out a few things.
Both a specialist contractor and surveyor who specialises in this have basically said not to worry.
Any water in there won't effect the building.
It's so old (early 1800's) that it would never meet the regulations that would make it water tight.
And that is in fact quite possible it is coming in through my neighbours anyway.
They have the old beer barrel hatch outside. And the previous owner said that it leaked in heavy rain. And the water ran down the chute into gullies in the floor and might be diverted into the space under mine.
It was bricked up by the developer as it was dry and technically a vented space
If my neighbour wants to turn it into a dwelling area it will be a very long winded and expensive process.
Finally (the flood) that she though was due to ingress from this little space, was in fact a burst main and was dealt with by the water board and just a one off.
All that remains is that the solicitor sorts the legal/access situation out.
Which is good news as I want to have fun repairing the sash windows, and bringing up the standard of the lead flashing.
if it were under the foundations you have a cave
Pubs have cellars.
Pubs have cellars.
Under the building, not under the ground or foundations, basements/cellars are part of the building.
Which is good news as I want to have fun repairing the sash windows, and bringing up the standard of the lead flashing.
You have sash windows and lead flashing in your cellar??
not under the ground or foundations
You might be thinking of a basement. A room, under a pub, for keeping drinks at the right temperatures, is a cellar, regardless.
EDIT: have you edited your post to say cellar/basement?. They’re not the same thing (although of course a room/space can be both).
And the previous owner said that it leaked in heavy rain. And the water ran down the chute into gullies in the floor and might be diverted into the space under mine.
No one thought to raise the hatch level to stop water running in?
You might be thinking of a basement. A room, under a pub, for keeping drinks at the right temperatures, is a cellar, regardless.
I can only imagine what the OP describes, which is a hatch at ground level into a space below the ground floor, which tells me the top of the basement/cellar/whatever is below the floor.
