10th March 2011 Top Floor Meeting

On Thursday 10th March 2011, the owners of the top floor flats all met, with Sharon and Simon Saffery, long time owners of 1F1, and I thought it may be helpful to capture a brief summary of what we agreed, in our shared interest of protecting our building yet avoiding a council statutory notice:

We will obtain at least 3 separate assessments / estimates for repair / maintenance of the whole roof at 46 Brunswick Street, asking for a detailed check to be carried out and a breakdown to be given for each of the following areas:

• Gutters/Rhones
• Flashing
• Chimneys
• Slates/Tiles
• Arials, etc
• Roofspace
• Stairwell 

The firms we shall ask will be:

• BBM (Sharon to contact)
• AO Blair (Sharon to contact)
• Aardvark (Alan to contact)
• Lee McNeice (Forster Roofing) (Catriona to contact)

In asking for these quotes etc, we will also ask for an estimate for how much a regular maintenance check would be, and what is and is not included.  All top floor properties will be contactable to make arrangement for access where required.

In the meantime, City of Edinburgh Council Property Conservation Department has now been contacted to let them know that we have been able to organise ourselves to make our own arrangements for repairs.  We hope that you will join us in this endeavour.

In terms of ongoing communication, we agreed that it would be worth trying this ‘blog’ to enable more consistent and regular communication. 

I will send details of this out (hopefully this weekend) to all the addressees which will explain what we are proposing and why, and that they can choose to subscribe to it by email (top right hand corner).  I will also invite them all to become an ‘author’, i.e. to be able to post messages. (This involves having a Google account, but it costs nothing and takes only a moment to set up if they’ve not got one already). 

I will also post some links from there to relevant documents such as the tenement act, etc etc.

I hope that everyone agrees that is a fair and reasonable way to progress.

Kind regards,

Catriona