Landowners but. . . . what lies beneath?

We finally exchanged and completed on 8th January and now own a very expensive key. No more squeezing around the gate or nearly knocking over the neighbour's fence as we can finally drive right into the site. Very useful when we needed to collect soil samples last week and get tools as close as possible.

Soil sample bottled in-situ

A quick catch-up for any new readers - we were concerned that there might be some contamination on the site as it hasn't been used as a residence and garden for a long time (>35 years) but has been used to store old cars and appears to have hosted more than a few bonfires. As you can read in our previous post, we negotiated a retention to cover soil testings and up to £4,000 towards any possible remediation costs. Samples were sent off last Wednesday and we just got the report back this evening.

Sample bottles ready to send to lab

The results are not great and, in some ways, not at all surprising. When I was digging out the samples I had to move loads of broken glass and metal out of the way - all buried under the top couple of cm of bramble roots and grass - and it started to dawn on me just how much cleaning up the site is going to require.

There's lots more like this!

Environment Agency "Soil Guidline Values" (SGV) give a first indication of levels of contamination beneath which there is minimal risk of harm to health and so can be useful in interpreting soil test results. Different values (typically expressed as mg/kg of dry soil) are provided for different land uses and we have focussed on "Residential" and "Allotment" (or "residential with plant uptake") uses to make sure that our land will be safe for food growing and for our kids to play in.

The SGV for Lead (Pb) is given as 450 mg/kg for both residential and allotment land use. One of our three samples came back at 985 mg/kg which is more than double the SGV and higher even than the SGV given for Commercial and Industrial use. Another sample came back at 702 mg/kg. The last sample, which was taken from some clay spoil that had been spread over the site, gave a reading of just 41 mg/kg which puts the others into perspective.

Other metals like Zinc and Copper showed high values too and we're checking those against Environment Agency SGV reports and other guidance.

So now starts the process of getting quotes for soil remediation and holding our breath to see if the £4,000 retention will cover it. Fingers crossed that the Community Infrastructure Levy exemption for self-builders comes through soon - but that's a whole other blog post to follwo very soon.

Nearly Land Owners

When we had our offer accepted back in mid-September I never imagined that we would still be trying, on the first day of the new year, to get Contracts exchanged. "2 to 3 weeks" was our Solicitor's over-optimistic view when we appointed him. That was before we realised that taking an estate agent's recommendation for which solicitor to use was a bit of an error. It's not a difficult site - just a very close old style 400V power line to risk assess and an old aerial image showing lots of old abandoned cars on the plot that prompted a concern about possible contaminated ground.

The Seller assured us that the old cars we could see in the Bing Maps birds-eye views were not there for a long time and that they were not wrecks. We actually got a whole back-story in scrawled handwriting involving the breakdown of relatives and friends' relationships - all to justify the presence of old cars and a strange gazebo. We didn't want to be in the position however where we bought the plot and subsequently discovered hydrocarbon and other contamination that might make the site unsafe for food growing or for our kids to play in the mud. Our (and by that I mean us and not our solicitor) suggestion was to propose a retention - £500 to cover the cost of independent soil testing and a £2,000 fund to put towards potential soil remediation costs.

The seller accepted the idea quickly but then and only then did our solicitor suggest that we included a "right to rescind" clause should the costs of remediation come to more than £2,000. So we had to go back to the seller with yet another demand. If I was in their shoes I would have been annoyed having just agreed to a retention. After correcting our Solicitor's proposed wording of the Contract Rider, we finally got a response back from the Seller - the right to rescind would not be accepted.

Faced with the prospect of exchanging Contracts and then potentially being left with a huge bill for clearing up any contaminated soil, we asked our Solicitor to look into specialist indemnity insurance policies to cover us. With just a few working days before Xmas and a massive workload, he failed to find anything for us.

Our Seller is so confident that no contamination will be found that he has now offered a £4,000 retention. We've taken a view and have decided to go ahead without insurance. I'll be biting my fingernails until the soil test results are in. We're pushing our solicitor to exchange and complete tomorrow or Friday so we could soon be landowners very very soon.

We've already started interviewing potential architects and so plan to hit the ground running. It's going to be a busy and exciting 2014. . . . .