In 1985, the claimants purchased a recently converted maisonette on the third and fourth floors of a 5-storey terraced house (a Grade II listed building) in West London, following a full building survey of the property which they had commissioned from the defendants. Three years later it was discovered that the conversion work had been defectively carried out, with the result that floor joists had been overloaded and consequently sagged. The defendants were held to have been negligent; it was said that a reasonably competent surveyor would have been sufficiently alerted by the rucking of wallpaper in one of the rooms to have investigated further, where he would have discovered other less obvious signs confirming the problem.
