A couple's "wonky" €843,000 dream home is to be demolished after just five years.
Madeline, 70, and Alastair Price, 69, will have to tear down the five-bed house they bought in 2018 as they can't even open the front door.
The couple's detached home, which overlooks open fields in Cambridgeshire, is laden with metre-long cracks that have been caused by swelling soil.
Insurers have blamed poorly-constructed foundations and ordered the house to be torn down and rebuilt as the damage is too severe to repair.
Madeline, a retired banker, turned gardener, said: "It's a nightmare really.
"The cracks are pretty much everywhere. None of the floors or work surfaces are level.
"Doors won't shut - I can't even open the front door because it's stuck."
"The insurance company said they can't save it. It's not just a building. It's our home."
Situated in the rural village of Wicken, near the historic cathedral city of Ely, the couple's home counts five bedrooms and three bathrooms.
Madeline showed how the cracks had destroyed her and her husband's home, which has underfloor heating, a wine chiller and a wood burner.
The couple's double garage has a two-metre-long crack inside, around half an inch wide, while the kitchen and sitting room are also affected.
The house's foundations which are around 1.5 to 2-metres deep, are being moved by the clay soil below, which is expanding due to ground heave, which is associated with the swelling of clay soils that expand when wet.
The couple claims that builders should have accounted for this when building the home, which came with a 10-year guarantee under the Local Authority Building Control.
Madeline said: "The soil is bone dry with evidence that tiny tree roots are still there. It's lifting the house up.
"They should have known what the land was like when building the house.
"We first noticed little cracks after a couple of years, but we put it down to normal new house stuff.
"It started in the hallway, on the staircase and in the back bedroom.
"A structural engineer visited and said it was clay heave, which is where the soil has expanded beneath the house."
Madeline and Alastair, who is also a retired banker, will now have to move out of the house that they share with their golden retriever when the demolition notice is given.
They will be given compensation to rent a property for six months - but the devastated couple says they don't know if they'll return their home or sell it off once it's rebuilt because of the disruption involved.
Madeline said: "They're going to demolish everything and do the foundations again.
"It could be at least two years out of the house.
"We wanted to live in the countryside, we thought this would be our home for a few years, and then we would move onto our final home.
"We don't know at the moment if we'll come back. We might just put it straight on the market when it's rebuilt."
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