Our 20+ year nightmare living in the house of horrors
Our 20+ year nightmare living in the house of horrors
Our family consists of two adults, John and Linda - we met and married in 1990. In 1991 our two children were born, Sean in January and Blaine in December. Their nightmare childhood began and they have been forced to grow up in atrocious conditions; each day has been a "Groundhog Day" to them.
As part of their normal development through life they have been unable to invite friends around due to the state of the house and the danger of the unguarded embankment – danger not only to themselves but to the general public.
Their education has suffered due to their lack of school attendance from ill health. Sean has asthma and his brother Blaine is predisposed to asthma. They are absent from school from a regular basis with recurring chest infections, be they do their best to catch up while they are off.
My dear Linda is disabled with fibromyalgia and is in constant pain. She has suffered this together with chronic allergies, staphylococcus aureus, chronic rhino-sinusitis, chronic stress exacerbated by the death of her best pal, her mum, with breast cancer and the execution in Iraq of her cousin Ken Bigley.
I suffer with chronic bronchitis, chronic allergies, chronic back pain, chronic stress and have recently undergone major surgery prostate surgery.
We cannot function as a normal family because there is always somebody ill all the time and this has been going on for years.
We think that the Council's plan is to drag things out year after year hoping that we might die or give in. In fact, it feels as if they are slowly killing us.
Our house is a small two up two down cottage with a small one up and down on the rear housing the bathroom and kitchen.
It is not designed as a house for a family of four because of its layout. For instance the kitchen is only 8 feet by 4 feet and will only accommodate one person at a time and is unsafe due to its layout and lack of space.
We have only limited storage for utensils food etc, there is no place for a washing machine, dryer, freezer etc.
To this end we have to use a rat-infested outbuilding which is located separately at the rear of the house some 7 feet away from it.
In this building we have our boiler, washing machine, dryer, freezer and food storage cupboard, together with furniture we cannot use due to the size of the house.
For instance, if my wife has to put the washing machine on or get food out of the freezer when it is raining, she has to put her coat on now in 2011.
The rear bedroom is a landing used as a bedroom, this allows access to the bathroom.
Our two sons have slept on this landing space, the size of a single bedroom, all their life up until adulthood, and will continue to do so as they go to University over the next 3-4 years.
This allows them little privacy in that anyone coming up the stairs to use the bathroom wakes them up, this also is severely affecting their social/interactive activities as they cannot invite any friends over etc.
It also makes homework more difficult and is a harm to their health as the room is affected by black mould.
As the bunk beds are against a radiator this could lead to the great possibility of burns etc.
If by any chance friends do come over our bedroom is used as an overspill for games, playstations and television.
The cramped condition allows illnesses to spread more rapidly.
The actual running costs of trying to keep our house warm is bleeding us dry financially
We use twice as much oil for a house of its size in order to keep the humidity down; it never falls below 70%
Due to the boiler being situated in the outhouse, the pipes from it lose heat while being ducted to the house.
There is no insulation in the house and the large amount of un-insulated masonry makes up the "gable" wall acts like a giant cold bridge which cools the house faster than the central heating can replace it.
This, together with the penetrating damp, as the wall was not insulated or weather proofed, causes condensation to build up which affects all the conditions inside the property.
We have run two dehumidifies, but even with these the humidity never falls below 70%. They are noisy and between them they consume 400 watts per hour when they are on.
As a back-up to the central heating we have a build-in LPG living flame gas fire/convector heater.
We have not been able to use this since 1999 as the LPG delivery firm refuse to carry the 46 kilo gram gas bottles around the rear of the house due to the danger of the eroding path and embankment.
Instead of the above, we have to use electric fires and fan heaters which cost a fortune to run. We also use our washing machine/tumble dryer more than a conventional house due to the fact that clothes, bedding, towels etc, if stored for even a short length of time, go mouldy, so we have to wash them more often. This adds the extra financial burden of the running of the washing machine/dryer together with the extra wear and tear on the appliances.
We dare not even consider drying clothes inside the house as this would add to the overall humidity.
The fact that the whole family is suffering from mould/dust mite related allergies means we have to adopt the regime: "wash, wear, don't store".
We have no security around our property. This includes access by the general public to the dangerous embankment which is just some feet off the highway.
This is due to the "permanent" fence or boundary specified in the 1996 demolition order, i.e. a 3 foot high pallet wood fence which rotted away and blew down in 2000.
We have had plants, plant containers, tools, hosepipes etc stolen.
The site is often used as a toilet by passing drunks on their way home from night out.
We dread going out for any great length of time in case we are burgled again, as the property next door is unoccupied for most of the time.
We have been trapped in this nightmare for too long.
For years and years I have searched for someone or an organisation to help my family to no avail.
Our life is really desperate as our health is deteriorating on a daily basis life has become so unbearable to the point that it has become meaningless.
You cannot disassociate the living condition imposed upon us from both the temporary and permanent illness that are now known to beset us.
Our health problems and those of our sons, there is no doubt that much of it can be attributed to the damp, difficult and stressful conditions in which we have had to live for the past 20+ years.
For years our family have been inhaling elevated levels of mould spores, since the spores are airbourne they have been settling on every surface we touch, our clothes, bedding and even the food that we eat.
A modestly sized house in good order is one thing.
Such a house rendered damp to the degree of almost permanent black mould on interior walls, rendered unstable and uninsurable on land that is threatening to collapse from under it because of inept activities by your Local Authority is entirely another
This regardless of any satisfactory conclusion of the irreversible impact on the physical and mental health of our family.
Our future looks bleak in all aspects of our lives, home our health and our ability to cope with everyday living, the stress of it all is driving us over the edge.
I am at my wits end as to how to protect my family from the harm that has been done to us over the years, I am at a loss as to which way to turn to find a satisfactory solution.
I have a very lovely and loyal supportative wife who is a gold brick, but my fear is that I am 10 years older than her and I might leave this mess for her to solve.
This may not be possible as her health is not good and all will be lost for her and my two sons in their future.
After spending many thousands of pounds of tax payers money producing schemes, reports that would not in any shape or form solve the problems associated with our house.
Our own engineers came up with a solution that would give us our BASIC needs but the Council has blocked this scheme all the way over the years.
The latest scheme produced did as previous not remove all if any of the identified hazards or cater for our disability needs.
Instead it produced a costing that far exceeded the previous costs, in fact excessively higher.
This was to enable the Council to use the excuse that the end value of our house would be far below the money being spent on it.
So any chance of a grant was denied.
The offer on the table was to buy us out at market cost (this to was inflated) and rehouse us in a Council house.
This would mean that our fight over the last 20+ years was pointless, all the money that we have paid into our house is lost and our two sons would lose all of their inheritance and be forced to live in a place not of their choosing.
Why should we be uprooted from here at the whim of the Council, we want to continue to live here, as it is our family home, where the family grew up albeit in appalling conditions.
The Council also intend to knock down the adjoining cottage No3 Alyn View, which has nothing wrong with it and is on the market at present for £125,000. So any prospective buyer will have a nasty shock once they have bought the cottage only to be seeking another purchase soon after.
