Well, life at Whitzend is starting to resemble something that could pass for normality. Increasingly the things with which we cannot deal are our own problems...
There are, of course, honourable exceptions to this rule.
Remember we mentioned that the shower was a bit flakey, in terms of finding the thermostatically balanced temperature? Paul the Builder was adamant that he'd fitted it correctly and it must be "dodgy parts, mate". Well, convinced by his eloquent argument, we called the manufacturer who sent out an engineer.
The engineer almost screamed when he saw the installation. The first thing he said was that the shower was fitted completely wrongly. He even showed us the big, red warning all over the instruction manual saying why one should never do exactly what Paul the Builder had done.
So, we need both showers to have their cold water supplies connected properly and have their valves replaced with the ones supplied, rather than the cheap pieces of jointing copper that Paul the Builder chose to use.
Whilst that engineer was here, I happened to mention the leaky sinks, which Paul had also ascribed to duff materials. Again, it turns out to be bad workmanship - the wastes have simply not been sealed to the sinks properly in either bathrooms (or the kitchen)
According to Trading Standards, we are obliged to give Paul the Builder an opportunity to come and fix his mistakes. To be honest, we'd really rather this was not the case, given the mess he made first time around (and second time around in the case of the kitchen sink) and the lies he's told in the process of it. But rules are rules, so we wrote him an official sounding letter, quoting all the consumer legislation that Trading Standards reminded us to quote, and gave him 7 days to fix it.
Before we even posted the letter, we were left hopeful by a text message from Paul, saying he'd come and fix things last Monday. In (not quite eager) anticipation, we waited until the end of Monday to see him and didn't post the letter. He returned the compliment by not turning up. So we posted the letter and he's still not come by.
On the one hand this means that we're almost certainly going to get the repair work done by someone reliable and qualified. On the downside, it means we'll have to pay for it all and then try to reclaim the money from him. This has the whiff of small claims court all over it already, to be honest. Ho hum.
Irritatingly, the day after we sent the letter outlining the things we wanted fixing, we found another thing - a bit of guttering they'd fitted which just isn't properly connected to the rest of the gutter, causing water to pour out through it, right past the bedroom window of Little Miss. I suspect the rules are that we have to send another letter and wait another seven days.
We've finally chosen carpets and booked fitting in. Happily, the fitters will also lay the laminate in our kitchen, so we get the whole house done at once. I'm sure it'll be hell on earth for a couple of days, but it's reassuring to know that the whole thing's almost done. Plenty of mottled, neutral colours which will help to brighten the place up a lot. Except for the hallway where we've branched out a little and planned a little "surprise". So, mind the mantrap and bear pit, visitors!
Carpets were meant to be fitted later this week but apparently our fitter collapsed on the job last Thursday (at least it was on someone else's floor). He's got something viral that looks like flu and a damaged coccyx so things have been postponed by a week. Still, that's more time to get all the other little jobs finished. A weekend of putting up towel rails and curtain track without fear of sullying the new carpet. Great.
Just the garden to go, then. Off to the turf accountants it is!
Saturday, 22 September 2007
Monday, 10 September 2007
Light at end of tunnel in "not oncoming train" shocker
Well, cripes, blink and you miss it, there goes August.
So, we stayed at the in-laws a while longer and the weeks of "overrun" mounted . Then we went on holiday. Then we came back and... it was almost finished.
Eventually all the plastering got done. We admitted defeat on the painting but by a stroke of utter (if deserved) luck we found a helpful and amenable decorator who lived just round the corner and was able to drop everything and paint almost the entire house in about a week, whilst we were shivering away on the North Norfolk coast (fast becoming a family tradition).
We got back from holiday and all the walls were painted. Most of the woodwork too. The kitchen was fitted and tiled and all the windows had the right glass in them. The collective sigh of relief must have been audible across the Chilterns.
Then we made the mistake of using the kitchen sink. It blocked.
Then we made the mistake of trying to open the back door. It wouldn't because it had been hung badly.
Then we made the mistake of trying to flush the toilet in the family bathroom. It wouldn't.
Then we made the mistake of trying to shut some of the internal doors. They wouldn't latch.
Then we made the mistake of looking in our garage. It was still full of building materials
So, we held our breath again and counted to 10 in a variety of languages, put up with it for the weekend, before calling Paul the Builder. He had a go at us for not calling him over the weekend, which seemed odd. He insisted that his "don't call me until Monday" text message had been a joke. I'd assumed that the only thing about him that was a joke was his project management skills, but apparently not.
Fixing the kitchen sink required a complete replumbing of it, which only served to highlight the rubbish job he'd done in the first place. Apparently there was a trap at the bottom of the tangle of badly fitting pipes which should have been removed to deal with the blockage. However, his dodgy plumbing meant that the trap (which needed to be unscrewed and pulled downwards) was hard up against the base of the unit it was inside, so this was not possible. Although we put some food through the waste disposal, the thing which seemed to cause the blockage was a big lump of silicone sealant that it was wrapped around and which seemed to match the large globs of sealant he'd used to try and connect the mismatching pipes in the waste of the sink.
Still, it was almost entertaining watching all the ways you could make dirty water squirt up out of various plug holes and overflows by blocking up various combinations of outlets. Not entertaining enough to want to do it again, mind.
But now our kitchen sink drains happily (although we did have to call out DynoRod one more time, when the poncey trap he put in the outside drain blocked up too). The main problem with the kitchen plumbing is that the water flow from the hot tap is so slow it's almost impossible to run a bowl of hot water to wash up, because by the time it's full the water has gone cold. Apparently this is down to our choice of tap, rather than his plumbing. This seems mildly ironic because the tap is from his recommended supplier, whereas the utility sink is our naff old B&Q one and that flow is fine. Hardly seems worth starting an argument with him about this, though.
Unfortunately, unblocking the sink ruined the kitchen unit it sits in, so he had to replace that in the process. Still, the complete mess he made of drilling holes in it for the various water pipes is rather artistic, in a Jackson Pollock sort of way. This was only matched by the utter mess he made of our stop tap. During the early building work, Paul the Builder extolled the virtue of using polypipe for the water main and made sure to put a nice run of pipe so we could have our stop tap in a sensible place. Unfortunately, at some point in the project this all went a bit wrong and the pipe got cut off too short so our stop tap is underneath the kitchen base units, only accessible by taking off the kickboard under the units and reaching under the sink, right to the wall. Not great if you have a water leak in the kitchen since you'll be lying face down in water to do this.
Plumbing in general just doesn't seem to be a strong point. The non-flushing toilet was, apparently, down to a duff plastic unit from B&Q. He claims it was like that when he got it out of the packet, but I'm not 100% convinced. He charged us handsomely for a lovely new plastic unit to replace it but it still won't flush reliably. This much it has in common with the other two toilets. Neither of the bathroom sinks actually holds water with the plug in, either. So I can't confess to being entirely happy with this.
Neither am I happy with the fact that we are going to have to spend about £500 getting our kitchen floor sorted out before we can lay our flooring. The chap we had round to quote on the job said that the floor is so uneven we're going to need hardboard bases putting in some areas and a latex leveling screed putting in other areas. Bizarre, I thought I'd already paid to have a level floor put in. My mistake, evidently.
It has to be said now that carpet is just about the only thing left to sort out and, frankly, I can't wait. This sounds daft, I'm sure, but I am still surprised at how dusty the floor is. All the rooms with no floor (which includes the kitchen, my study, our bedroom and Little Miss's bedroom) are a constant source of plaster dust every time you step on them. You do not want to drop clothes on those floors because they get covered in it. We have to get dressed standing in the middle of the bed. And boy do you notice where they've not hammered in the nails into the floorboards properly.
Anyway, I'm happy now because Paul the Builder and his crew of merry men are now out of our lives. They've left the site and I don't expect they'll be coming back. I can't really be bothered to fight over the kitchen floor not being level. It's almost worth £500 to me to make sure they don't come back. Equally, the ongoing and slightly bitter argument about our central heating can wither on the vine now. We agreed that he would refund me the £100 he charged because his people broke our old heating controller and he had to replace it (apparently it was our fault for still wanting to live in the house and demand heating or hot water, other wise he'd have carefully removed it before his boys ripped a radiator off the wall above it and drenched the thing). Having refunded me, he spun me some utterly rubbish story about the way the boiler worked to justify the fact he'd put in a cheap and simplistic controller for the heating. Once I found this to be wrong - by calling up the boiler manufacturer - he started to get very shirty with me about replacing it, once again threatening to dredge up all sorts of other hidden costs that he would start to charge me for. I did point out that he caused over £600 of damage to stuff in our house (from the bookcase his carpenter fell through, to my office chair which is randomly missing some of its wheels, to the candlewick bedspread which they decided to cut up and use as a general cleaning cloth, etc).
Again, by not pursuing this I keep him out of my life, which I now consider a victory.
And there we go. A nice, straightforward 8-10 week project which would need us to be out of the house for at most 2 weeks. Instead, it lasted about 17 weeks and we were out of the house for 8 weeks. Ugh.
On the plus side:
Game over.
Post script:
About a week or so after we came back from holiday, we were still waiting for the last of the building materials to be removed from the garage. Paul the Builder was claiming to be keen to get it moved on because he needed it for his new project (presumably the one to which we lost most of our workers as we approached the final limp to the finish). We were told that the householders had not returned from holiday, so there had been no access to the garage to store their stuff securely. Now they were home and everything could move one project to the right.
Saturday afternoon, around teatime, there was a knock on the door (Paul's men still hadn't put the doorbell back). It was the lady of the house from Paul the Builder's new project was at the door. Obviously she HAD returned from holiday now (though her plasterboard was still in our garage). She wanted to ask if we were happy with our project. Given that we were still living with quite a few of the, er, idiosyncrasies of the project at that stage we gave rather a warts and all account of what had happened. She went pale. She told us about her situation: it seems that her project had started whilst they were on holiday. Nothing wrong with this you may think, but the issue was more that she hadn't asked them to start - even she had not signed a contract. She also had her suspicions that the chimney stack she'd asked to be rebuilt had only been repointed. Furthermore, she told us about some research she'd been doing on other of his projects and all was not well. As well as one other project we knew he was being sued over, there was another project where he was being sued because someone's new floor had been condemned. Seems like we got off lightly.
Anyway, we agreed that she should definitely look elsewhere for her plumbing services and she was seriously considering telling them all to get out and stay out. Good luck to her. She has my sympathy, but I'm just glad this is over.
Next time, we buy a house that has all the rooms and amenities we want.
Pictures of our interior will doubtless arrive in due course for your delight and delectation. As soon as I work out where the lead for my camera has gone. Pictures of the exterior will follow, too, once we've got a landscape gardener in to get rid of all the rubble and concrete embedded into the mud which Paul the Builder could not be bothered to remove.
Thanks for reading, watch this space for more pictures in the (hopefully) not too distant future.
So, we stayed at the in-laws a while longer and the weeks of "overrun" mounted . Then we went on holiday. Then we came back and... it was almost finished.
Eventually all the plastering got done. We admitted defeat on the painting but by a stroke of utter (if deserved) luck we found a helpful and amenable decorator who lived just round the corner and was able to drop everything and paint almost the entire house in about a week, whilst we were shivering away on the North Norfolk coast (fast becoming a family tradition).
We got back from holiday and all the walls were painted. Most of the woodwork too. The kitchen was fitted and tiled and all the windows had the right glass in them. The collective sigh of relief must have been audible across the Chilterns.
Then we made the mistake of using the kitchen sink. It blocked.
Then we made the mistake of trying to open the back door. It wouldn't because it had been hung badly.
Then we made the mistake of trying to flush the toilet in the family bathroom. It wouldn't.
Then we made the mistake of trying to shut some of the internal doors. They wouldn't latch.
Then we made the mistake of looking in our garage. It was still full of building materials
So, we held our breath again and counted to 10 in a variety of languages, put up with it for the weekend, before calling Paul the Builder. He had a go at us for not calling him over the weekend, which seemed odd. He insisted that his "don't call me until Monday" text message had been a joke. I'd assumed that the only thing about him that was a joke was his project management skills, but apparently not.
Fixing the kitchen sink required a complete replumbing of it, which only served to highlight the rubbish job he'd done in the first place. Apparently there was a trap at the bottom of the tangle of badly fitting pipes which should have been removed to deal with the blockage. However, his dodgy plumbing meant that the trap (which needed to be unscrewed and pulled downwards) was hard up against the base of the unit it was inside, so this was not possible. Although we put some food through the waste disposal, the thing which seemed to cause the blockage was a big lump of silicone sealant that it was wrapped around and which seemed to match the large globs of sealant he'd used to try and connect the mismatching pipes in the waste of the sink.
Still, it was almost entertaining watching all the ways you could make dirty water squirt up out of various plug holes and overflows by blocking up various combinations of outlets. Not entertaining enough to want to do it again, mind.
But now our kitchen sink drains happily (although we did have to call out DynoRod one more time, when the poncey trap he put in the outside drain blocked up too). The main problem with the kitchen plumbing is that the water flow from the hot tap is so slow it's almost impossible to run a bowl of hot water to wash up, because by the time it's full the water has gone cold. Apparently this is down to our choice of tap, rather than his plumbing. This seems mildly ironic because the tap is from his recommended supplier, whereas the utility sink is our naff old B&Q one and that flow is fine. Hardly seems worth starting an argument with him about this, though.
Unfortunately, unblocking the sink ruined the kitchen unit it sits in, so he had to replace that in the process. Still, the complete mess he made of drilling holes in it for the various water pipes is rather artistic, in a Jackson Pollock sort of way. This was only matched by the utter mess he made of our stop tap. During the early building work, Paul the Builder extolled the virtue of using polypipe for the water main and made sure to put a nice run of pipe so we could have our stop tap in a sensible place. Unfortunately, at some point in the project this all went a bit wrong and the pipe got cut off too short so our stop tap is underneath the kitchen base units, only accessible by taking off the kickboard under the units and reaching under the sink, right to the wall. Not great if you have a water leak in the kitchen since you'll be lying face down in water to do this.
Plumbing in general just doesn't seem to be a strong point. The non-flushing toilet was, apparently, down to a duff plastic unit from B&Q. He claims it was like that when he got it out of the packet, but I'm not 100% convinced. He charged us handsomely for a lovely new plastic unit to replace it but it still won't flush reliably. This much it has in common with the other two toilets. Neither of the bathroom sinks actually holds water with the plug in, either. So I can't confess to being entirely happy with this.
Neither am I happy with the fact that we are going to have to spend about £500 getting our kitchen floor sorted out before we can lay our flooring. The chap we had round to quote on the job said that the floor is so uneven we're going to need hardboard bases putting in some areas and a latex leveling screed putting in other areas. Bizarre, I thought I'd already paid to have a level floor put in. My mistake, evidently.
It has to be said now that carpet is just about the only thing left to sort out and, frankly, I can't wait. This sounds daft, I'm sure, but I am still surprised at how dusty the floor is. All the rooms with no floor (which includes the kitchen, my study, our bedroom and Little Miss's bedroom) are a constant source of plaster dust every time you step on them. You do not want to drop clothes on those floors because they get covered in it. We have to get dressed standing in the middle of the bed. And boy do you notice where they've not hammered in the nails into the floorboards properly.
Anyway, I'm happy now because Paul the Builder and his crew of merry men are now out of our lives. They've left the site and I don't expect they'll be coming back. I can't really be bothered to fight over the kitchen floor not being level. It's almost worth £500 to me to make sure they don't come back. Equally, the ongoing and slightly bitter argument about our central heating can wither on the vine now. We agreed that he would refund me the £100 he charged because his people broke our old heating controller and he had to replace it (apparently it was our fault for still wanting to live in the house and demand heating or hot water, other wise he'd have carefully removed it before his boys ripped a radiator off the wall above it and drenched the thing). Having refunded me, he spun me some utterly rubbish story about the way the boiler worked to justify the fact he'd put in a cheap and simplistic controller for the heating. Once I found this to be wrong - by calling up the boiler manufacturer - he started to get very shirty with me about replacing it, once again threatening to dredge up all sorts of other hidden costs that he would start to charge me for. I did point out that he caused over £600 of damage to stuff in our house (from the bookcase his carpenter fell through, to my office chair which is randomly missing some of its wheels, to the candlewick bedspread which they decided to cut up and use as a general cleaning cloth, etc).
Again, by not pursuing this I keep him out of my life, which I now consider a victory.
And there we go. A nice, straightforward 8-10 week project which would need us to be out of the house for at most 2 weeks. Instead, it lasted about 17 weeks and we were out of the house for 8 weeks. Ugh.
On the plus side:
- Our new bedroom is wonderful. We've finally got most of the new furniture built and installed - a decision I'm bound to regret when the carpet fitters turn up and demand we empty the rooms, but still - and it's still a good size and the views are lovely. Being away from the road mean it's really quiet too.
- The boys are really enjoying having their own bedrooms (although it took number 2 a little while to get used to the idea of having his own space) and it means that we've been able to move quite a few toys out of the playroom so this is now a nicer space to be in.
- The kitchen is great, and will be even better once we've decided exactly where everything ought to live (and where the heck we've put everything).
- Having a utility room is cool. Even though we've not quite worked out how to arrange things in there, yet (our oh-so-bright builders decided to put the appliances in there whilst we were away and cleverly put the freezer in so that you can't open the door properly because of the radiator) it's nice to have one room where the clothes washing happens and - for me - even better that it's not right outside my study door.
- The new colours of the rooms are fabulous and make the rooms look big. This is especially noticeable in the hallway.
- It even feels nice to have our garage back (particularly as the enormous stack of flat-pack furniture gradually diminishes - only 1 double wardrobe, 1 bedside table, a kitchen table and 9 chairs to go!)
Game over.
Post script:
About a week or so after we came back from holiday, we were still waiting for the last of the building materials to be removed from the garage. Paul the Builder was claiming to be keen to get it moved on because he needed it for his new project (presumably the one to which we lost most of our workers as we approached the final limp to the finish). We were told that the householders had not returned from holiday, so there had been no access to the garage to store their stuff securely. Now they were home and everything could move one project to the right.
Saturday afternoon, around teatime, there was a knock on the door (Paul's men still hadn't put the doorbell back). It was the lady of the house from Paul the Builder's new project was at the door. Obviously she HAD returned from holiday now (though her plasterboard was still in our garage). She wanted to ask if we were happy with our project. Given that we were still living with quite a few of the, er, idiosyncrasies of the project at that stage we gave rather a warts and all account of what had happened. She went pale. She told us about her situation: it seems that her project had started whilst they were on holiday. Nothing wrong with this you may think, but the issue was more that she hadn't asked them to start - even she had not signed a contract. She also had her suspicions that the chimney stack she'd asked to be rebuilt had only been repointed. Furthermore, she told us about some research she'd been doing on other of his projects and all was not well. As well as one other project we knew he was being sued over, there was another project where he was being sued because someone's new floor had been condemned. Seems like we got off lightly.
Anyway, we agreed that she should definitely look elsewhere for her plumbing services and she was seriously considering telling them all to get out and stay out. Good luck to her. She has my sympathy, but I'm just glad this is over.
Next time, we buy a house that has all the rooms and amenities we want.
Pictures of our interior will doubtless arrive in due course for your delight and delectation. As soon as I work out where the lead for my camera has gone. Pictures of the exterior will follow, too, once we've got a landscape gardener in to get rid of all the rubble and concrete embedded into the mud which Paul the Builder could not be bothered to remove.
Thanks for reading, watch this space for more pictures in the (hopefully) not too distant future.
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