Living in my Persimmon Home – 3 years on

My Persimmon Home posts are often my most viewed by people looking for Persimmon reviews, so I thought it would be a good time for an update as it’s been a while since my last one. We’ve lived in our Persimmon Home new build for three years now!

Catch up on previous posts:

• Experience so far – after a few weeks of moving
• 18-month reivew

In my last post, I spoke about how Persimmon had put in planning permission to get the bungalows that were going to be built behind our house changed into two-story houses. This got rejected, and they are now building the bungalows with ridiculous-sized gardens. It seems like they had always planned to put extra homes in. With the plan rejected, the gardens to the bungalows are so big that I am actually jealous! But that is a small win for us, as it means there isn’t going to be a house directly looking onto our back garden.

Since my last update, we’ve had two major issues with the windows and toilets.

The windows

We’ve had the glass replaced in about 5 of the windows in the master bedroom/ensuite. This is because the window panels had somehow been damaged so condensation built up inside the double glazing. This was inside the two panes of glass. Which shouldn’t happen as it should be sealed. We have not had this issue in anywhere else other than the front bedroom, which is a bit odd.

We did manage to get them replaced by Persimmon, although we had a bit of trouble as they told us we were out of our 2-year warranty where Persimmon would fix any issues such as this. But we reported it before them two years so after a bit of fighting, we managed to get this sorted.

Window Handles

Quite a few of the window handles are hard to close. There is one in particular where I struggle to fully turn the handle to close it all the way. One broken so we were unable to secure it – you could just pull it open from the outside!

The toilets

The toilet in the ensuite started leaking. It leaked under the flooring and through the ceiling, leaving a water patch in the hallway.

It was the seal that was leaking so my husband had to replace it. He also had to replace some cistern parts in all three toilets as they would just continue to run after flushing.

The road

18 months ago, Persimmon finally laid the road outside our home. It was yellow bricks which looks quite nice but you could see it wouldn’t last very long. Almost immediately some of the bricks came loose and sank. You could hear them clatter as cars drove over them. When it rained, water would pool on the uneven surface.

Well, in recent weeks they have been pulled up and relaid. Resulting in a good few weeks of disruption and noise while this work was redone. I hope this won’t happen again and need future road closures. Though I assume once the estate is complete and handed over to the council, it won’t be their problem.

Everything else is fine apart from general wear and tear on things like carpets (thanks to the cat) and such.

We haven’t had anything major or that has caused extensive damage. On the local community page, the general feeling is that some people have some problems but they are quickly fixed – the site manager for our estate seems responsive to our problems. He’s easy to talk to, friendly and gets things sorted. One issue a lot of us have is the drainage in the gardens. I’m pretty sure I mentioned it my last post, that the water doesn’t drain so areas of the garden turn to slush in the wetter months.

From reading other people’s issues, it seems that some sites do have more issues than others. I would recommend searching for local community pages on Facebook and asking questions to the residents of a particular site/area before committing to your new home. We often get people doing this on our community page.

I do honestly think that most of the issues are minor and though annoying, this hasn’t put me off buying a new build again. What has put me off us how close the houses are to each other. We hae a detatched house but it’s very close to the next one – there’s probably about 1 metre distance brick to brick. I also hate how newbuilds don’t have front gardens. We have a small bit of grass but it’s not fenced off, there’s no pavement either so a lot of people walk across our grass!

I am craving a bit more space around us as with all the gardens looking on to each others, when it’s sunny and everyone is outside you can hear everyone. This usually result in someone playing loud music. And there’s nothing worse than listening to other peoples music!

But other than that, I’m happy enough with the house and the site. I wouldn’t buy a new build again but that’s more due to the space around the house and the bedrooms tend to be qutie small compared to older houses.