Potential basement non-compliance - help please!

[Queenofswords88]

We’re in the process of buying a house. It was sold to us on the basis that it’s a two bed house but the basement room (which has an en suite bathroom) fulfils all the building regs criteria to be an official bedroom, subject to a fire door being added at the bottom of the basement stairs.

We’ve said we want evidence to reassure us the basement room will be a compliant bedroom if the door is added on. After going round the houses (pardon the pun!) it appears the only way for this to be evidenced is for the door to be added on and the council to come round to sign off the basement room. The sellers are pushing back strongly on doing this, because of both cost and timing. (Although we’ve been flagging the issue since the start of the process, the agent and our solicitor seem to have only started paying attention and working out what is required in recent weeks, at quite a late stage, and the sellers are in a hurry to complete.) We’ve been told we might need to decide whether we are willing to walk away from the sale due to this issue.

We didn’t instruct our surveyor to do a formal valuation, but he did say he thinks the house is probably worth what we’re paying for it even without the basement room being an official bedroom. However I think we are paying a very high price for the property and I was only willing to offer the amount we did on the basis it will be a three bedroom house with the door added.

We’re inexperienced buyers and would welcome any advice/tips! Thanks.

To be fair they got an email from the council which they forwarded on to our solicitor, but the email said we could contact the person at the council with any questions. In general I feel that we’re doing a lot of the legwork on this issue though!

What are you actually worried about?

If you are only worried that there is no fire door, why not plan to install one yourself as soon as you move in? If you want to be really fussy about it, ask for a small price reduction to cover the cost.

If you are worried that the Council will come after you and demand that you get full building regs sign off after the fact, I’d say that was almost certainly an unfounded concern. By the time you come to sell it will be even less relevant.

But it sounds more like you feel you won’t be allowed to use it as a bedroom if it is not ‘compliant’. But that’s nonsense. Once you’ve bought the house you can sleep wherever you want. No one will be coming round and checking.

The main concern is the price we are paying for the property - I think we’re paying too much for a two bedroom house with basement space and I want to be sure we can market it as a three bedroom house when we come to sell. (Obviously I also want to make sure the works are done in a way that is safe and won’t cause us any issues with the council or our home insurance provider.)