We're renovating our house. Before starting, we agreed with the builders a price of £29K for the whole job.
During the process, they decided to replaster the whole house because it made the painting easier (the original brief was only to replaster "where necessary" and to paint all the rooms). They also cut out a lot of redundant plumbing and neatened up the electrics (not part of the agreed scope of work). When they did this extra work, they spoke as if they were doing us a favour, not asking us if we wanted it done, and not asking us for extra money, and consequently we were very grateful and thought them very conscientious builders going above and beyond, etc.
Since then, OH and I have been talking about what a great job they're doing, and we thought it would be fair to pay them for the extra work they did. (We envisaged about £2K for approximately an extra week of labour and materials.) We asked them to send us their estimate for the extra cost, and obviously they were pleased.
Today they sent through the extra costing, and it was £4.5K. My husband said this was too much, and after a few hours of thinking, they sent an invoice for £3.3K.
What would you do? Bearing in mind:
- We've spent most of our money, and there's other stuff we need to pay for (ie we technically could afford it but don't really want to).
- The builders have 2 more weeks of work left to do, and we want them to do it well (ie not get angry at us and trash the place).
- We are genuinely grateful for the extra work and want to be FAIR to them.
- We didn't anticipate this cost, and one could argue that they quoted too low to start with, which is their responsibility? And they shouldn't have done the work without agreeing a cost beforehand?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts!