r/Glasgow Tools

Pretty much at my wit's end and apologies if this is a bit long and complicated. But I'm losing my mind over here and I can use any advice I can get.

I own and rent out my tenement flat on the south side after I moved abroad a few years ago. I hope to return to it one day. I was only able to afford it in the first place because I got lucky with my work and came into enough money to go into a deposit.

Over the years, and despite numerous complaints from other residents and owners, the building factors have been neglectful to an extent that now threatens the fabric of the building.

In particular, they have persistently failed to take care of a serious fungal outbreak on the ground floor wall of the close outside my property: having checked it with a damp meter and finding it to be soaking some years ago, they then scraped the fungus away without, to my knowledge, any further treatment or investigation.

Last year, a leaking down pipe was reported, and the factors workmen repeatedly failed to turn up to fix it. Altogether, there were delays of several months before they finally arrived after many stops and starts.

This down pipe runs through the same part of the close wall where the fungal outbreak was first brought to their attention some years ago (and which has been there, according to my own records, since at least 2010) and left largely untreated.

When they finally fixed the down pipe in September 2021, the contractors caused a major escape of water in an upstairs flat that then soaked the bathroom of my property below it.

The factors did not inform me of this - remember, I live abroad - and I learned of it \*only by accident\* months later, from a neighbour who emailed me.

Worse, dehumidifiers were not put in place that would have dried out the woodwork to prevent further damage.

I wrote a complaint to the factor, which was upheld. Meanwhile, they found evidence of a serious dry rot infestation around and under the bath, which is located a few feet from the down pipe.

I made an insurance claim and a loss adjuster concluded the dry rot beneath the bathroom floor wasn't related to the down pipe, or the untreated water damage, and my claim was refused.

Instead, he concluded the cause was a lack of ventilation.

I enlisted a loss assessor (reminder: loss adjusters work for insurance companies, assessors for you and me), but the loss adjustor persuaded his opposite number the dry rot and leaking down pipe were unrelated. The assessor decided against my case.

But, I did get £1,000 (£650 after the excess) for the flood.

Still not convinced, I hired dry rot specialists to do an intrusive survey costing £1,200. The bath and floorboards were taken up, revealing a serious dry rot infestation, and the bath had to be binned. Their report strongly suggested there was after all a link between the down pipe and the dry rot.

So I had the dry rot specialist talk to the loss adjustor, who assured him the down pipe was fixed, and couldn't possibly have contributed to or be involved with the dry rot.

I thought that was that. No choice but to pay thousands to get the bathroom and common wall fixed.

That's when I found out the factors would only allow their own ‘trusted’ contractors to do any common repairs. After everything that had happened, this was the last thing I wanted. But! The dry rot people agreed to just do the work on my place and try to persuade the factors separately to let them do the common repairs.

The dry rot specialists turned up at my flat two days ago only to find the supposedly long fixed down pipe spewing water everywhere, and a second unreported leak somewhere under the floor of my flat. They can't do the work until the factor send out a plumber, and who knows when that will be?

The loss