Timber decay surveys and treatment in Edinburgh

A good share of the enquiries that come in from this side of the country arrive with a date attached to them. The single survey inside a home report has flagged something, or a lender's valuer has written a line asking for a report from a timber specialist, and there is now a solicitor, a date of entry and a mortgage offer all waiting on a piece of paper that does not exist yet.

If that is why you are here, what you need is easy to describe and rather less easy to arrange in a hurry. Somebody has to come and look, and you need it back in writing: what is there, what is wetting it, whether it is still live, how far it reaches, and what putting it right would cost. If you are not buying anything and simply lifted a corner of carpet in your own flat and did not like what you found, it is the same visit. You just have nobody chasing you for the result.

What the home report has actually told you

Not a great deal, which is by design rather than by failure. The single survey is a visual inspection of a whole property carried out in a couple of hours by a chartered surveyor. Floorboards do not come up, walls do not get opened, and timber decay is not the job they are there to do. What they can do is notice evidence, put a repair category against it, and recommend that somebody who specialises in it goes and looks properly.

So a category two or category three line mentioning rot, damp or beetle attack is a flag, not a diagnosis. It might come to a soft window sill and an afternoon of joinery. It might be a joist end that has been sitting in a wet wall since a downpipe cracked, in which case the repair reaches further than anything you can see from the room. Nobody knows which yet, including the surveyor who wrote the line, and that is precisely why they wrote it.

What a lender is looking for in the report

Lenders vary and nobody can promise you in advance what a particular one will accept. What they ask for is fairly consistent though, and a report is a great deal more use when it contains all of it.

• What was found, named properly, rather than a general line about damp and decay
• Where the water is coming from, because a repair that leaves the cause running is not a repair
• Whether it is active now, or old damage that stopped when somebody fixed a leak in 1998
• How far it extends, and what had to be opened up to establish that
• What the remedial work involves, itemised, with a price against it
• What could not be inspected on the day, and why not

That last one carries more weight than people expect. A report implying the whole flat was inspected, when in truth the common cellar was locked and nobody could get in, is worth less to a lender than one that says plainly which door was shut and what would need to happen to see behind it.

Working backwards from a date of entry

Put your date in the enquiry. Everything else gets planned around it, and if it cannot be met you will be told that rather than strung along until the week before. Two things hold these jobs up, and neither is the survey.

1. Access to a property somebody else still lives in. The seller has to agree, and the estate agent has to organise it. Start that the day the report lands, not the day before your date of entry.
2. Access to shared space. Edinburgh flats routinely have a cellar off the common stair, a shared basement, or a drying green with the only route to the rear elevation. Somebody with a key, often a factor, has to be asked, and that is the step people forget.
3. The extent of the opening up. Lifting a couple of boards is quick. If the trail runs into a wall or under a stair, more has to come up before anyone can honestly write down how far it goes.

On the money side, a report is evidence rather than an outcome. Whether the price is renegotiated, whether a retention is held from the loan, or whether the seller is asked to get the work done before settlement, is a conversation between you, your solicitor and the other side. All the report does is turn an alarming line in a survey into a specific problem with a specific number against it, which is what makes that conversation possible.

Three readers, the same visit

Buying. You need the identification, the cause, the scope and the cost, and you need it before your dates run out. The report is doing two jobs at once: telling you what you are buying, and giving your solicitor something to work with.

Selling. If you already know there is a soft patch in the bay window or a run of flight holes in the attic, having it surveyed and priced before the property goes on the market takes the query off the table. Buyers imagine a worse number than the real one, every time.

Living there. No deadline, no solicitor, and the report is for you rather than for a lender. The advantage is that the work can be sequenced sensibly instead of being crammed in around a settlement date.

What the East tends to throw up

Dry rot in Edinburgh is a basement story more often than not. Georgian and early Victorian terraces across the New Town and Stockbridge sit over stone vaulted cellars, some of them running out under the pavement, with almost no ventilation and a wall that has been damp since it was built.

Wet rot in Edinburgh is usually a window. The city has an extraordinary quantity of surviving sash and case windows, sitting in stone openings, taking driven rain off the Forth on whichever elevation faces the weather.

Woodworm in Edinburgh is mostly the ordinary furniture beetle in softwood floors, but the East holds enough genuinely old oak that identifying the beetle properly occasionally changes the whole job.

If you would rather start with the paperwork than the problem, thetimber survey page covers what the visit involves and what the report contains. If you are still trying to work out which of the three you are looking at, the national guide totelling wet rot from dry rot is the quickest way to narrow it down.

Where the eastern team works

Edinburgh itself is the bulk of it, from the New Town and Stockbridge across to Leith and Portobello, and south through Marchmont, Bruntsfield and Morningside. Beyond the bypass the work runs out through Musselburgh, Dalkeith, Bonnyrigg and Penicuik, west to Livingston, Bathgate and Linlithgow, and over the bridge into Fife for Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, Glenrothes and up as far as St Andrews. East Lothian means Haddington and North Berwick. The Borders means Peebles and Galashiels.

That spread is not accidental. It follows the property, because a Fife burgh, an East Lothian coastal terrace and a Borders farmhouse have far more in common with an Edinburgh tenement than any of them have with a modern estate house. Solid stone walls, timber built into masonry, suspended floors over cool voids and a lot of surviving original joinery, all of it in a climate that stays wet for months at a time.