If you’ve been following along you’ll know that today was the day of the snagging inspection, carried out by New Build Inspections. They also sponsor this blog, and the inspection was free as a result of this. If I’d paid for it the cost would have been £480.

So, would I feel happy if I’d had to shell out my own money? Read on…

The short answer is “Without a doubt”. The peace of mind of having someone with the professional skill to spot the actual or potential problems in the property and explain them to me clearly is, to my mind, worth much more than that.

All told the snagger spent over two hours at the house, examining the exterior, the garden, the garage, and gave a comprehensive going over to the interior.

Now, it’s late on a Saturday night, and to be honest I’d rather be upstairs than typing away on the laptop and fighting with Photoshop, so I’ve only re-worked a few of the photos that I took at the moment. I’ll do more over the next few days.

Keep in mind when you look at these that Crest Nicholson had told me that they’d completed all their snagging, and that as far as they were concerned the house was ready.

So, first off, here’s a tile that’s slipped from the roof in to the gutter.

What’s not obvious from this photo is that that’s on the second floor, above the conservatory, so it would be very difficult for me to get up there on a ladder and fix it. That’s a job for a builder with a lot of scaffolding.

Moving a little lower down, here’s a shot of one end of the gutter on the garage.

There are two problems here. The first is the big gap visible (and highlighted) towards the bottom left of the picture. That’s going to be a problem in the future.

The other problem is that the end of the gutter dips down. Which means water is going to collect in there, along with anything else that happens to fall in. A few months down the line I’ll probably have a small lawn in there.

The third thing is relatively minor. Here’s a composite shot showing the colour of the bannisters, and the colour of another decorative part of the stairs.

As you can see, they’re completely different.

There are other things I don’t have photos ready for the web yet, including:

• Concerns about the drainage in the garden, and what that might do to the patio tiles a few years down the line. This is potentially a really big issue.
• Almost all the internal doors have chains on them that makes them self close. This is a fire regulation. On all bar one of those doors the chain is not sufficiently tight, so the door does not completely close and latch.
• There’s paint all over most of the exterior metal-work — hinges, latches, door handles, and so on. A lot of the interior windows have paint on them still too. I’ll have photos of this up at some point.
• Light switches wired incorrectly (and inconsistently) — for some of them ‘on’ is the up position, instead of the far more common ‘down’.
• One of the upstairs windows, which is (according to the appropriate regulations) supposed to (a) not have a lock on it, and (b) fully open without a spar in the middle of it, fails both these tests. So if you need to get out of the house in a hurry (perhaps there’s a fire, and the fire brigade are down below with a net) you can’t use that as an escape route.
• No rubber stoppers on many of the drawers in the kitchen, or the built-in fridge door, so they slam shut rather than closing softly. About a third of the doors do have them, so perhaps they just ran out of them one day and forgot to fit them.
• The cupboard under the sink had flooded and ‘blown’. We’d noticed that weeks ago, and had been told that it had been replaced.
• Paint on the granite worktops in the kitchen

And so on.

I should be getting the full report on Tuesday. I’m very interested to find out what Crest’s response is. More news soon.