MyNestBox Guides

If you are looking at a house to buy it’s reasonably safe to assume that it already has the appropriate Planning Consent in place for how it is. This is because when your solicitor is underaking their searches, they will need to confirm that all is in order, and if they don’t then they are not doing their job.

30 Second Guide - Surface Water Flood Risk

Surface water flooding happens when drains and watercourses are not able to cope with the amount of water run-off from buildings, footpaths and roadways.

30 Second Guide - Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI)

A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) is special case of land notified under the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981)

30 Second Guide - Scheduled Monuments

Scheduling is the selection of nationally important archaeological sites. Although archaeology is all around us, scheduled sites form a carefully chosen sample of them, which are closely managed.

30 Second Guide - Radon

Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas formed from the uranium present in all rocks and soils and can cause lung cancer.

30 Second Guide - Greenbelt

The purpose of Green Belt is to control inappropriate future development in rural areas. Green Belt doesn’t have a retrospective impact on houses. Green Belt can therefore create additional restrictions on any future development on your new home.

You are looking for a new home, the house looks perfect, it’s close enough to work and handy for the shops, but what about the local schools? You only need to pick up a newspaper at the right time of year to find an article on how to get your child into the right school simply by moving to the right area.

Solid as a rock. It’s a well known saying. If only it were as true as it sounds. Building regulations and practices have evolved over many years and it’s reasonable to assume that your new home will be built on solid foundations and you can have confidence that the odds of your home being safe and secure are extremely high.

When you are looking for a new home, you tend to spend a lot of time looking at the front (waiting for the agent to show up) and then really concentrate on the inside of the house, but how many of us have more than a cursory look at the garden? Is it big enough? What direction does it face? But do you really have a look at what is growing in it? I suspect not.

Surface water flooding happens due to heavy rainfall when drains and watercourses are not able to cope with the amount of water run-off from buildings, footpaths and roadways.

If you are observant, when you drive around the countryside, you may notice that some old houses are built on slight rises in the ground, or inexplicable positions. The old folk when they were building houses and farm buildings were able to draw on generations of local knowledge to avoid areas that they knew to be risky.

When you are looking for a new washing machine or TV, you’ll see multicoloured stickers indicating the energy rating of the appliance. Whilst you won’t find one on the front of your new home, you will find, amongst the sales particulars, an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC).

You may come across one of a variety of acronyms when you are house hunting that relate to ecological designations. One of these is SSSI which stands for a “Site of Special Scientific Interest” or ASSI (“Area of Special Scientific Interest”) in Northern Ireland. This is an area of land that has been designated by the National Environment body for special protection measures when they believe that the location has features of special interest, such as its wildlife, geology, or landform.

Although it is now virtually extinct as an industry in Britain, there is a long history of coal mining going back to and beyond the middle ages, and whilst you might think that you know where it has taken place, coal is much more widespread than you might think. Aside from areas you may think of, coal mining has historically taken place in such places as Devon, Kent, Somerset, Pembrokeshire, Lincolnshire and Sutherland.

You look at a building and think that it’s solid as a rock but all is not always as it seems. There may be hidden problems that have yet to manifest themselves, or the evidence may already be there for you to see when you view a house. Building subsidence occurs when the ground beneath a building sinks, pulling the property’s foundations down with it. I’ve written previously on what I have called Natural Subsidence where subsidence occurs as a result of the nature of the underlying rocks.

Good quality air is essential for good health. People should be able to expect that the air they breathe won’t harm them. Air pollution occurs when air becomes contaminated with substances not normally associated with the natural composition of the air for that particular area.