Party wall agreement - advice!

[ThisGoldHedgehog]

Hiya. I’d love a bit of guidance. We’re looking to knock through the wall between our living room and kitchen in our terraced house. Our neighbours are aware and are fine with it. Would we be alright with just a pro forma party wall agreement? If so, where might I find a template, please?

Thanks!

Whilst one can, in theory, do a DIY party wall agreement I’d caution against it. Who will be the arbiter if your neighbours decide, like ours did, that your works caused damage to their property?

Oh, dear. I was very much hoping nobody would say that.

Agree with PP. Our party wall was worth its weight in gold when our neighbours turned into a nightmare during our renovations and tried to push all manner of their own house refurbishments onto us at our expense for apparent damage. They attempted all sorts of blackmail, fabricated complaints to the council and endless stress

We insisted on the survey to be completed by the surveyor who conducted the original checks to confirm the damage relative to original condition. Funnily enough, it kept stalling at this stage because there is no way we could have caused the damage they claimed we did. 2 years later, they finally got the picture we were not progressing without it and have left us alone

So you knew someone might ?

Bottom line is your neighbour would be nuts to allow anyone to make modifications that might lead to damage their house unless proper considerations were made in terms of the nature of the work being done (how it would impact their house structurally etc), in terms of what happens if anything goes wrong etc.

I would want my own independent surveyor appointed to look after my interests (I believe this would be at the modifiers expense).

No, I didn’t. It’s an expression.

This is a strange post to be snippy on.

That sounds awful! I’m so sorry.

The experience taught me never to trust neighbours. We had a perfectly decent relationship before we started our building work (the exact type of work they had already done to their property). When they wanted their own surveyor, I could see their reason for wanting to protect their property so while it was more expensive for us, we accepted it as cost of the work.

However once commenced, they treated us like an open cheque book for anything they could potentially get out of us. Constantly distracting our builders, asking them to look at things for them (which they politely shut down), all sorts of unreasonable complaints in the hope we would do something for them to pacify and then never ending complaints about the party wall. They tried to use it to get us to replace floorboards at the opposite end to the adjoining wall, painting their whole house and a host of other issues.

The one saving grace is that we could keep directing them back to their own surveyor who they chose

I would advise to 100% do it through a solicitor and get surveys done first - this will all be at your expense - BUT it’s worth the cost to save any claims later on as per PP posts