We bought our house in February 2019 and had a 25% deposit, the rest was mortgaged. We undertook the basic mortgage survey. We have some out buildings attached to our house in a temporary looking structure but physically accessed through the house.. they look like sheds from outside but can walk through to the kitchen. They were marked on the survey as outbuildings. They run the whole length of the house and adjoin us to next doors property who have a similar structure. The houses are semi detached but this joins us to another semi detached on the ground floor level only. Hope this makes sense, I can provide a diagram if not.
The roof is leaking and we want to have some work done to fix this. We have had builders round who have said it is a fire hazard as we are joined to next door in a bizarre unsafe way. Next door could climb into the roof of the structure and drop through our roof if they wanted as it is unsafe and flimsy work. Our builder suggested our mortgage survey was not conducted properly as it should have deemed this unmortgageable as the outhouses are connected to the main house in an unsafe way. We are shocked as we did not realise the extent of this. We want to make our house secure and are pricing this up. But I am wondering if anyone has experience of this and whether we should seek legal advice? We are aware that we did not take the home buyers survey but we did not realise the structure of the house was so flimsy between the buildings and that it compromised our house so much in terms of fire safety. We also don't know the implications of sharing a flimsy structured building adjoined to our neighbours similar structure and whether we can tear this down if needed without their permission, in order to make our house safe. Any thoughts or where we should start to unpick this? Obviously there is no planning permission which was not flagged to us at any stage of the process