General Chat

Councils now use external contractors to do work.
I have a very nice brick shed.
Unfortunately, the wooden window frame was rotten, as was the doorframe, and the door was falling apart.
I contacted the council, pointing out that my household insurance wouldn't cover contents in the shed, whilst in this condition.
A lovely man came out, replaced the window, door frame and door, and said someone would be out to do some repointing.

Four months later, I'm still waiting!

When the Council had their own workers, they had an amazing foreman, John, who would come around, assess the situation, send in the workers, and come around afterwards!

MyBuilder.com is good and we have used them a couple of times. You advertise your job and people message you to come and quote for the work. Tradesmen can't be on the site if they aren't reliable. We had the bottom 2 rows of brickwork repointed all around the outside of our bungalow 3 years ago and it only cost £250, less than he quoted.

Some tradesmen have always had several jobs on the go at once. The other problem at the moment is them getting supplies to do their work, so it makes sense for them to have other work they can do if they can't get all the materials for a job they are on. Merchants are even rationing supplies.

I have a list of Mr Men who have done jobs for me and who I can call on again

Since Michael passed it’s getting people in to do jobs we would do together like decorating

I tell a new workman who has done a good job that not only are they now on my list but I would recommend them to others

Been lucky so far it getting good workmen

Helps too if they are on the council good traders list as they are monitored

My son, in Basingstoke, struck gold with his builders. He was converting his attics - a large job and a couple of years later he rebuilt half the ground floor!!

In both cases the builder told him that he might have quite a wait before the work was started, but that once they came they would finish the job in one go. They did too, coming every day except for a couple when the weather made roofing impossible.

They are highly recommended and very busy. :-)

When we had a porch knocked down and a new one built and the builder was our sons school friend, he messed us about with us, he said he would leave it unfinished if we kept on, I told him he would be hurting bodily and financially if he did that.

I used to live in a tied house with company maintenance teams. We would all often hand over our keys so work could be done but they never cleared up after themselves. I got into a bit of trouble for not letting in, unannounced, aworkman to finish off a job. I was on my way to work. Bosses were a bit taken aback when we explained I didn’t have time to prepare the room for the safe installation of interior fibre glass wadding given the non clearing up.

How lovely to find that in the real world contractors tended to do all their cleaning up.

The in-house maintenance team never returned to reline the cracked chimney. Am quite surprised that the house is still standing!

I'm just happy someone turns up at all.

I agree that a lot of trades people do take on more than 1 job at a time so that they have a job to go to when one finishes.
Hope it gets finished soon for you.

ZZzzz, when i was doing up my old house, our builder took on several jobs at once. He would then do 1/2 day with us and then disappear for 2 days. They cherry pick jobs and start all at the same time as if that way they stop anyone else from getting the work.
When i complained to ours, his reply was, if you keep on at me, i shall disappear and not come back! Sadly we didnt had another choice as good builders were hard to find and he was the best so we had to just go with it. But very annoying.

So I think like us you have to grit your teeth and hope he shows up again soon. He is probably working on another house elsewhere...its what they do!

Florence in the hebrides

We always seem to have problems with tradespeople, gardeners, carpet fitters, builders, they all seem to do a bit of the job go away for half a day or more and come back to not finish the job, does any trade person do any job in one go anymore.
Our house has been a mess for a few days so far.
Rant over again.