Brittany woman's nightmare scenario after home deemed 'uninhabitable'

A WOMAN FROM BRITTANY FACES THOUSANDS IN EXPENSES AFTER THE INSURANCE COMPANY WAS ABSOLVED OF RESPONSIBILITY A woman from Brittany has found herself in a nightmare position after her house

was deemed to be uninhabitable due to various construction problems and the insurance company won a court case absolving them of responsibility for covering the repair costs. Cécile Baudry

bought her 135-square-metre house in the town of Questembert (Morbihan) for €210,000 in 2010. She first noticed problems with it in 2016, beginning with signs of subsidence - when the ground

under your property is sinking causing internal damage to the foundations of the house. THE FAMILY WERE FORCED TO LEAVE THE PROPERTY ON THE GROUNDS IT WAS DANGEROUS In 2017 she notified the

courts of the problems and an expert deemed the house “dangerous and uninhabitable” in 2019. The expert cited various issues such as the crawl space height being too low and insufficient

ventilation as well as a missing, important concrete slab and moisture rising from the ground. Ms Baudry had to leave the house with her two teenagers to move in with her parents. The

builder who constructed the house sold his company in 2015 and has since changed activity, making it complicated for him to be implicated in the responsibility for the problems. In 2020, a

court in Vannes ruled that the builder’s insurance company Maaf should cover the costs of the €286,000 needed to repair the property. REBUILDING COULD COST HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS But Maaf

appealed and won its case this September because work on the property technically began in 2006, two years before the insurance policy was taken out. It means that Ms Baudry now finds

herself in a position where she needs to reimburse Maaf for the repair work that has already been carried out as well as continuing to pay a mortgage on a house that she cannot live in. She

plans to appeal to the Court of Cassation but all this will be expensive. French newspaper Ouest-France, which has followed this story, estimates that it will cost €40,000 to demolish the

house and €300,000 to rebuild it. A crowdfunding campaign has been launched to help Ms Baudry cover the numerous legal costs. RELATED ARTICLES HERE IS WHERE TAXE FONCIÈRE HAS INCREASED THE

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