Buying a Victorian House
They differ from houses built in the Georgian period and before, in that they are, in the main, less ornate and externally showy but very sturdy and built to last. For this reason, buying a Victorian house can be a good idea. Richer properties, however, are often quite decorative, with many adopting a mock Gothic or Tudor style.
What makes a house a Victorian?
The brickwork is often patterned, using what is known as Flemish Brick bond, with alternating headers (small side of brick) and stretchers (long side of brick) on the face of the wall, with headers centred on stretchers above and below.Typically, houses are on terraces, with gardens front and back and the kitchen at the back. You can often find barge boards present (decorative wooden panels on the gable ends of roofs).
The arrival of plate glass in 1832 meant windows could be larger, with fewer panes. So you still have sash windows, similar to the Georgian period, but with just a single glazing bar down the middle. The Gothic revival meant stained glass was popular and it can often be seen on doors and at the tops of windows.
Three-sided bay windows were very popular. Often, a ground-floor bay window has its own roof above it for ornamentation, or the bay continues to the first floor with the bay roof above that.
Rooms most often have high ceilings, and properties of this era generally have steeply pitched roofs. If you are considering a future loft conversion, for this latter reason, a Victorian attic is normally an excellent candidate.
Each room normally has a fireplace with a stone, marble or wood surround, and as a result, you find a lot of terracotta chimney pots on top of these properties.
Porches were also very popular in builds and are often ornate. You also often find date stones – names and dates in stone above doors. You also often have cellars – a considerable advantage in terms of storage space.
16% of homeowners discover defects
In our recent survey, 16% of homeowners found defects; including 2% who were able to pull out of a bad purchase, 7% who were able to negotiate a better price, and sadly, 7% of homeowners who did not get a survey and discovered defects after the purchase.
12 of the 39 who remembered how much these defects cost to remedy spent over £5,000
Don't burn your money, book a survey.
What to look for when buying a Victorian terrace?
Many problems associated with this kind of property are called ‘high-level problems’ because you often need scaffolding or a platform such as a cherry picker to fix them.Some Victorian properties have rooms with 30ft high ceilings and so are beyond the reach of someone with average DIY experience!
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The parapet walls (these stand proud of the roof tiles around the party walls) may be leaking, copings can be loose and rendered sides may be cracked.
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Stone and brickwork can be eroded by general weathering or cracked as a result of structural movement. Lintel construction can frequently be poor, and walls are often re-pointed using cement mortar or covered with a cement-based render: this can be disastrous because this may require a lime-based mortar, which eradicates damp build-up.
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Floors may have dry and wet rot and woodworm. This can often be obscured by the latter placement of hardboard and plywood flooring on top. A RICS surveyor carrying out a building survey is an expert at detecting suspicions of rot in these situations.
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Plumbing may consist of lead piping; lead is a cumulative and deadly neurotoxin. Once again, replacing all pipes might you many £1,000s.
If your Victorian property is a listed building, this can be highly problematic regarding planning permissions and building regulations if you are looking to refurbish, extend or modify your property.
What kind of survey do I need for a Victorian terrace?
When looking into getting a Victorian house survey, all chartered surveyor experts would recommend you get a building survey, for many reasons referred to above and lots more.Victorian properties can prove to be an excellent investment because they are, in the majority of cases, built to last for a very long time, but they do need maintenance, sometimes to redo faulty previous work.
Depending on the findings of your Victorian house survey, you may also need to get a timber survey from a damp and timber specialist. They might also raise suspicions about sub-standard or out-of-date electrical wiring and may recommend an experienced electrician to remedy this.
Caragh is an excellent writer in her own right as well as an accomplished copy editor for both fiction and non-fiction books, news articles and editorials. She has written extensively for SAM for a variety of conveyancing, survey and mortgage related articles.