A Party Wall sounds like much more fun that it actually is.
A Party Wall is a wall that acts as the boundary between buildings owned by different people. And, as we learned to our great dismay about a month ago, in the UK the Party Wall Act requires building owners to notify the adjoining owners if they want to do any work that will affect the wall. Work like cutting into the wall to attach a steel beam to it--which is exactly what we have to do.
Astonishingly, the local government handbook on the Act says specifically that "The Act contains no enforcement procedures for failure to serve a notice"! However, if you don't serve notice, and you start work, and the adjoining owner finds out, you could end up in court--definitely not a risk we were willing to take.
Apparently the Act was intended to facilitate people doing home improvements that involved party walls. How ironic--after going through the whole process, I can safely say that it's actually more of a disincentive than anything else. In theory, you can outline your proposed work to your neighbour, and get him to agree in writing that it's fine. But failing that, it becomes what is called a "dispute" What happens then is that you pay chartered surveyors to draw up an agreement about the work, and both parties sign it. The catch is that the person wanting to do the work has to pay all the costs of hiring the surveyors, which means the adjoining owner has absolutely zero incentive not to take it to "dispute", even if he doesn't actually have any objections!
So (you can guess where this is going), our proposal went into "dispute" even though our neighbour had no objections to our proposed work. In the end, we did finally get our Party Wall "Award", which was basically no different to what we had outlined before we were forced to hire the surveyors. So almost a full month later, and with a few thousand pounds less in the bank, we are finally ready to start work on that wall...
