AIBU in asking for this compensation?

[namechangeyetagain1]

Posting in AIBU for traffic but if anyone feels another thread would be better - please let me know! Also posting on behalf of a friend!

Friend has bought a new build house and has part-ownership with housing association (not sure this is relevant but going to give all the facts)

6 days after moving in she decides to have a bath. She has used bath before as the shower is over it, but not filled it properly. Once she's finished and has gone downstairs, she realises the bathwater is coming through the ceiling/light fittings/dripping down walls. It's also soaked into her brand new carpet she's just had fitted.

She turns off the downstairs electrics, phones the housing association and developers of the actual housing estate to let them know. They send plumber & electrician but neither will do anything due it not being an active leak anymore & needing electrics to dry out respectively. Next day plumber comes back to fix the bath - the pipes underneath hadn't been fitted properly and the electrician comes back to check the electrics and turn it all back on. In the meantime, she's lost a fridge/freezer full of food, had to cancel plans the night it happened and had to take the day off work to let the plumber and electrician in. Naturally she is seeking compensation from the developers.

She's requested the following compensation;

Damages (not including carpet as they have already sorted replacing that, but stuff like food in fridge/freezer, a games console that was on the floor, canvas on the wall etc.) - £470
She then has rounded this up to £1000 to include lack of electricity for 16 hours, no washing facility for 17 hour, cancellation of personal plans, inconvenience and emotional stress.

So in total she is seeking £1000 compensation. After a lot of back and forth - this happened over two weeks ago - the developers have come back and offered £470 full and final settlement.

AIBU to think she could ask for more and they should pay up without question? She was so excited to be owning her first property and moving and they have taken all the joy out of it and caused a very stressful time for her. They are also still using the same plumbing company who made this stupid mistake on houses not yet completed on the site.

Keen to hear what the lovely people of MN think and thank you if you got this far!! It was a long and tedious post I know...

Windmillinsummer

Definitely not me - I can only ever hope at owning my own house!

Thank you all for responses. I thought they were messing her around with delaying the initial payment (literally have no experience of this so no idea how quickly things get paid out) but seems general consensus is it's a bit CF-ery to ask for more. I will pass comments on (nicely)

I do feel bad for her though, it was a long drawn out process to get the house and to have it happen in the first week in her brand new house was rubbish for her

YABU and your friend us a bit rubbish at rounding.

Wow - wait until she matures in to a proper adult and sees what real emotional stress is....and that you don't get compensated for it!

Very grabby. Loss of earnings possibly but emotional distress is ridiculous

You can request compensation for material losses, beyond that it seems very excessive - asking for £50-100 seems more appropriate

Very similar thing happened to me with a new build. Builders paid to put right all the plumbing and decor, replaced carpet and damaged furnishings.

But that's all and tbh it wouldn't have occurred to me to ask for money for 'emotional distress'. Shit happens, no-one maliciously damaged anything.

I think I would embarrassed to be so grabby.

Seriously? It's part of owning a home. I think she's done well to get everything paid for, no questions asked. How on earth is she going to cope with running a home if she expects compensation for "stress"?

YABU Take the settlement they are replacing the carpet and your problems have been solved. Housing associations are actually charities so the more they pay out on things like this the less they have to buy, maintain and keep rent down. How can you expect an extra £530 for emotional stress, its not like she has had to get signed off from work for a week and her weekly pay is £530.

*laughs into cup of tea

That’s not rounding up, that’s more than doubling the actual loss incurred. Rounding up would be £500!

When I moved into my first owned home the cooker had been left with (very old and sticky) chip drippings, the entire house had not been cleaned since our last viewing (months previously) and there were cat feces smeared across the floor - we then found said cat (still alive!) locked in the garage. I was also pregnant at the time.

Welcome DF to house ownership. It is an emotionally stressful thing but you are compensated by owning your own home.

They should pay the £470 for her quantifiable losses like a console and food.

The rest of it is her chancing her arm. "Rounding it up" would be £500, not £1000. Chancer. CF, if you like.

Maybe rounding up was the wrong wording 🙈

“Rounding up” - seriously! That’s an absolute joke! Fair enough claim for what she actually lost (why do people always just happen to have laptops/games consoles on the floor under the very spot the leak comes through though...), but emotional distress is a joke. It’s called being an adult and owning your own home.

I don’t understand how she lost that much freezer food though: modern freezers stay frozen for 16-24 hours, and even so the water went through the lights, not the sockets, so the electrician would have just turned the lighting circuit off surely: and the kitchen would be on a separate ring. And I don’t know how you would lose stuff out of a fridge...

And to comment that the plumbing company are still employed... of course they are, it’s one flipping pipe! There are about 10,000 small elements in a house, of one of those goes wrong it can be inconvenient but if every contractor who ever did a tiny thing wrong got sacked there would be no one to do any work. Seriously some people are ridiculous: would you sack an office administrator for accidentally putting the wrong address label on or using the wrong colour folder, no!

Emotional stress? maybe owning a home isn't for her

Legally if she lost pay for the day she could claim that other than that it will just be financial loss incurred.

DFS wouldn't let me cancel our sofa that I'd ordered literally 48 hours before because it was 'in production' (as if) I was cancelling because our house sale had fallen through, I was actually sobbing on the phone! The lady didn't care

30 quid maybe for take-away if she couldn't cook!

If we all got 500 every time we were mildly inconvenienced, IKEA and the trains would owe me a billion. Pain and suffering is ACTUAL pain and suffering. Not mild annoyance!

Oh I'm so sorry!! Wrong thread

If she does manage to negotiate the £1000 of rounding up can she come have words with my employer about rounding my wages up

In all seriousness, yes it’s rubbish that it’s happened but actually a good thing it happened so quickly as she probably wouldn’t have been covered at all further down the line and the costs would have had to either be picked up herself or through insurers.

ElyElyOy I could actually vouch for the console - she'd just moved in and things weren't in their right places yet.

And the electrics were funny - we tried to isolate one room but on the circuit board, the whole of downstairs bar one room was on the same switch.

And before someone says it's my house again, she is a very good friend and we spend a lot of time together hence how I know so much about it. I popped round the night it happened to see if could be of any use with moving things.

We're convinced - you're not a CF......just the friend of a CF!

I think it is cheeky to ask for or expect more.

Charmatt

Phew! I do sometimes read these with a bit of scepticism (yeah yeah your friend sure...) but my friend isn't on here so can't post for herself and I was interested to see what MN would think of the situation.

She is a cf. £470 is all she should get. No wonder insurance premiums are so high.

Plumbing problems and other snagging issues are part and parcel of buying a new build. The builders fix it and move on. They don’t have to pay compensation for distress.

When we bought our million pound new build there was a serious issue with a retaining wall in the garden. It took over 6 months and a team of builders and structural engineers to dig it all out, survey it, reinforce it and repair it during which time we had no access to our garden. We pushed quite hard and they included a new shed, a long raised bed and some planting as a gesture of good will but that was just trying to keep us sweet as some houses on the development still weren’t sold. We weren’t actually entitled to anything beyond the necessary repairs.