Come share with me your tales of builder woes to make me feel better!
We have just got a revised bill back from the builders (three months after we asked) after querying some of the work (because when you work from home - you do notice how long they are there!) with a 'full' explanation on why they had charged what they had with the icing on the cake (spoiler there was no reduction in hours!) some 'extra work' added in that they had forgotten - as quoted here:
"I am quite grateful that you did ask me to check the hours as I completely missed adding into the pointing and external wall works invoice the time for replacing the bathroom window sill. Had I not had to go back into my totting up I would not have spotted it."
Our problem all along has not been with the quality of the work (which is excellent - so maybe I should count my good luck and move on!) but the fact that they never exactly quote for the work - it is always given as a verbal estimate, reassurances that it will be reasonable and then always comes in WAY more than we budget for. EVERY SINGLE TIME. I feel like an idiot writing that - surely we should have learnt by our mistakes but somehow the work is agreed to (by my DH!) and next minute they are working away - clocking up those hours!
So we have just paid up (raised my eyebrows at the just how long they seem to have laboured over every job) and moved on...
However the last one I did query as I have been home a lot of the time and while I didn't keep track exactly (as always in a bloody zoom meeting) I sometimes did notice as I was interested in what they were doing.
So when I mentioned that there was definitely only one person working on the room above my home work study (as I was very aware of this and did keep track) and it was for only one and a half days, and only one person - I was confident about that...
The reply:
"The time allotted for the roof repair was not quite allocated correctly, as Zazas suspected, however all the 18 hours were spent on works at the house. The time of 9 hours for X (name of builder) and 6 hours for X (name of other builder) was for attending to the roof repair including sorting out materials, access etc…. For the rest of the day X attended to a couple of different things which had accidentally been lumped in with the roof repair when allocating work to items. 2 hours was down to the final fitting and fixing of the down pipe on the front of the house and 1 hour was down to removing the rear downspout to remove a blockage. I think that the shuttering to the step may also have been removed at some point during that day as well including some cleaning up but was not separated out. Whilst X's time was not quite separated out correctly there has been no duplication of time charged.
Seriously - so you admit that there was a mistake, but then just wrap up all the hours into some other jobs that might have been done (and I've actually paid for as these were already itemised on an earlier invoice) and that is that - no consideration to the fact that I might just be right and the fact that this was work done over 10 months ago now (so hard to remember what exactly was done by who) and just maybe you got it wrong like you did with not including the other bits in the original invoice.
Anyway rant over (I won't bore you with the other issues) - we will steal / borrow and beg for the extra money from somewhere but I have put my foot down about using them again.
Tell me your stories to make me feel better for paying about £8,000 more than we were expecting to pay (as we did have some idea due to previous work) or to just be grateful we even got someone to do the budding work and it is not shoddy!