Planning for when can't do DIY

Training my children and son-in-law. ;-)

Tim

Find a non-DIY friend who has to employ someone to do everything for them. Then approach said fixer to see if they can do stuff for you as well.

I am part way down this route because I don't bend enough to get into corners and fiddly bits. My upper body strength is way down as well.

It will happen to most of us eventually.

Cheers

Dave R

Decide what needs to be 'fixed' and what can be safely ignored (or fixed by buying a new one). If something needs regular attention, like tap washers, ?replace the entire tap now

I get regular local booklets where close-by tradesmen advertise, and some places have 'repair cafes' where you might be able to find some useful contact details.

I reckon/hope I have another 10 years of reasonable mobility left before I need to think of such things. And my plan as I sit here now is, come the time, to move to a low maintenance house. New build or similar. Or, and this is extreme, a flat.

Is there a LOCAL facebook group? Where I live there is a group just for the town and asking on that usually results in recommendations but the group is mainly about what's happenings locally and for some strange reason a lot of local photos all with the same of similar subject matter. Where friends live in a rural area the group seems to work a lot better. When recommendations are requested many dozens of people will suggest 2 or 3 local tradesmen who will do the jobs.

Age UK have (or had) lists of people who would assist the elderly and repair items at fair prices.

My knees are shot, so it can be painful to do some things, but I can still do them and just suffer. Children are useful for sending to crawl under the floor!

My mother has recently banned my father from working up extension ladders, in case he has a dizzy spell, but he's still allowed to use the scaffold tower. He's 87. His main problem is a tremor, so it's an effort to get a screwdriver lined up on a screw - although he's ambidextrous and has less of a tremor in his left hand.

My Mother moved in as a second owner on an 18 month old house for just that reason ,14 years on things mainly on the plumbing side have shown weaknesses . Plastic microbore on the CH has started to weep at radiator connections and one leaked so badly it badly damaged the the ceilings of and walls of two downstairs rooms, as a 95 with limited mobility she doesn’t enter some spare bedrooms for days and hadn’t noticed the leak. The pleasant looking bathroom fittings looked nice with toilet wastes nicely boxed in but when one leaked the panelling got ruined and getting it replaced would be another expense to add on so it is waiting for my brother who is a builder to do it,except he is always too busy. I live 200 miles away so it isn’t practical for me.

New techniques lets builders put them up quicker but a lot depends on how good the installers are.

GH GH

Who was the housebuilder, OOI? I don't know if there's a difference between small-scale local builders and volume tract-builders. Maybe infill new build is better than new estates?

Theo

Midas homes, reasonably large but mainly based in the Southwest. They seem to have been wound up in 2022/23 leaving some unfinished projects.

The house and its neighbours look quite presentable but the first thing I noticed was the noise when somebody walks around upstairs , the floors just seem to shake and squeak compared to older houses. The plastic microbore actually looks very tidy as it comes out of the walls with only a couple of inches to the radiator connections, trouble is if you want to check the small weeps that developed there was no play at all without digging into the wall.

GH

From personal experience do not, under any circumstances, ever buy a leasehold property, especially one on a so called retirement estate, you would be better off sleeping in a cardboard box in the local rec.

Landlords are pretty grim anyway, retirement development landlords especially seem to regard older people as fair game.

My home is leasehold, but it all depends on the terms. In my case, the ground rent is fixed at £3.75 every 6 months; the terms specifically state that I can build or demolish what I want, with no requirement to ask permission or pay a fee; the ONLY restrictions are that I keep the boundaries marked (with fence, wall or hedge) and that I keep a building on the land that is capable of attracting a specified minimum annual rental value ... but as that was set in the 1930s, my garden shed easily covers that! The lease has 909 years to run, so no problems there.

With retirement estates the landlord remains responsible for property maintenance, most flats are the same, sounds like you may have a leasehold house?

In message snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net>, Jeff Gaines snipped-for-privacy@outlook.com writes

Ex-leasehold flat owner here.

The lease I had specified that I was responsible for repairs to the interior of the flat, but the free holder was responsible for the exterior. The windows were defined as being part of the exterior.

That came in handy when I had double glazing people cold call, asking if I'd like a quote. They were rather confused when I told them that I didn't have any windows.

Adrian

The charity Age UK has a 'handy person' service that can handle some stuff. They fitted grab-handles for our bath, a second bannister and a handrail for the front steps.

I suspect that the 2 or 3 local tradesmen are self-recommending or the names are put forward by family/friends rather than satisfied customers. It's a cynical world we live in.

Good call, thanks.

See

I have had a couple of very active friends who have woken up in the morning, complained to their wives of back-ache and died on the spot of a heart attack.

In both cases their wives had little idea of what to do with the computers, finances and certainly not fixing dripping taps and overflowing toilets.

I'm wondering whether just to get people in on jobs I could have managed just to be able to assess them and put them on an "emergency list" for my wife and I.

Just come from seeing a friend who has just sold his late mother's L/H flat - one in a block of 42, major retirement landlords with a 24hr warden on site. Bought around 2015 for £180,000, 2 bed in a nice part of Sheffield.

Agreed to sell for £40,000 2 months ago. Reduced the day before exchange to £30,000 as the service charge increased 25% to £8,000pa. That doesn't include utilities, but should include maintenance - which didn't stop an ad hoc charge a few years ago for lift repairs.

Moral in there somewhere . . .