whiskeyomega wrote:
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
whiskeyomega wrote:
Is it bad news to have a house with septic tank and storage heaters
and no mains gas and a flat roof on an extension? Or is he being
bloody silly?

IMHO, the main thing would be to get some form of affordable
heating. Is wood for burning readily available since you live in a
rural area? --

I don't think that our heating is unaffordable really. It may not be
as warm as others but it being on would help

We are currently heating the whole place on one large heater in the
hall ( 3.4 kw) and one small heater in the sitting room ( 1.7kw) ,
There are two heaters in the sitting room but we have the smaller of
the two on. To give you an idea the sitting room is 20ft x 13ft. The
dining room next to it is 10ft x 12ft . Both bedrooms are 12ft x12ft
and neither has a room heater on. The hall heater is supposed to
heats them ( its a 3.4 kw ) but the kitchen sucks a lot of heat from
the hall. The kitchen is freezing to be honest and wet - water down
the windows and water down the tiles on the walls and mould growing
on the ceiling across the coor and windows.
He just says we cant afford to put the heating on but I work and get
£200 a week and he has £200 a week pension - ok so not as much as we
got when he was working .

He just wont let anything be done.

On and there isn't a supply of wood. We would have to open up a
fireplace anyway and we don't have a fire grate, and we don't have a
boiler and we don't even know what the previous owners did when they
blocked the fireplaces up. We could find ourselves knocking out
breeze blocks and find nothing in behind at all. I doubt I could
afford the money to put a new fireplace in there - and the cost of
coal according to my parents is rather more than our electric right
now.
Besides he us just hell bent on seeing us freeze with some Victorian
idea of going in the poor house ( I am not kidding - he seems to
think we are going to be poor because he is now on a pension)

I think he is looking at the bigger picture here, and you should too.
The house is cold and damp, and in the next 8 - 10 years is going to be even
damper and probably colder, which at your (and his) time of life isn't going
to do either of you any favours healthwise, plus the fact that your 200 per
week will probably be a distant memory by then and you'll have to survive on
half what you are getting now.

To put the house right, IE central heating, DG, new kitchen, bathroom and
pitched roof on extension plus a DPC is going to cost more than you can
afford, unless you remortgage the place, wheras if you sell, considering
it's in a rural area (another minus point for two pensioners in a cold, damp
property), you might get twice what it's going to cost you for a modern unit
in town, leaving you a nice nest egg and a comfortable retirement in a warm,
safe environment.

OTOH if you really want to stay there, for the sake of the health and
wellbeing of both of you, you need to get proper heating(*) and a chemical
DPC installed at least. The flat roof will cost you a couple of grand every
25 years or so if you want to leave it on, and I'm sure you could put up
with the green bathroom suite for a while.

(*)
You can get CH that runs on bottled gas or oil, and it still probably works
out cheaper than electricity.

--
Phil L
RSRL Tipster Of The Year 2008