English Rose Kitchen

So close and yet so far

Getting the home improvement loan
Stepping back a bit, I realise I’ve never told the sorry tale of how we’re managing to fund the project.

I bought the property 10 years ago during a slight dip in the market and just before the sustained house price boom of the late 90’s to the mid naughties, so we decided to re-mortgage to raise the money to renovate the flat.

Re-mortgaging
The was just before the credit crunch grew its head of steam so things were a little easier and as it turned out, by switching to a new mortgage company and to a lower interest rate, we effectively raised the entire home improvement loan while slightly reducing our repayments. It’s a tracker mortgage, just below the Bank of England base rate.

How I imagine the mortgage company’s lawyers to be

Bloody conveyancing lawyers!
The re-mortgage agreed, the fun began. You see lawyers for mortgage companies, estate agents, buyers and sellers of property have contrived to milk the arcane system of property ownership in this country for all it’s worth. To explain briefly, my property is a house comprising two apartments (OK, flats to us Brits). I live on the ground floor and, as is common in these situations, I share the freehold of the property with the owner of the upstairs flat, while each of us has a 99 year lease on our own floor.

OK now that I have a few pieces it’s time to approach the stripping process. I accept that I’ll probably have to totally dismantle the units to do a proper job and I already know how hard that can be.

I’ve heard several suggestions as to how to strip the units back to the aluminium. They include sand blasting (but that dents the aluminium) media blasting (leaves the aluminium intact, but doesn’t remove rust) or some sort of chemical remover, for example Nitromorse.

The next thing will be what to do with it once the metal is exposed. I’m assuming it will start to oxidise again almost immediately, so either we need to duff it up in some way in preparation for painting, or polish it up and protect it somehow if we were to keep it nice and shiny aluminium. We know that’s possible because Source Antiques do it!

Anyway, I realise that a bit of Googling will reveal some of the answers which I will do, but I wanted to state the problem first and, of course, invite comment. So to some extent, over to you!