Why are some tradesmen so unreliable?!

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Have contacted 3 separate guys for a quote to refit my bathroom. All came recommended.

First one - no reply to my Facebook message, or voicemail, nothing.

Second one - spoke to him, then just didn't show up to price.

Third one - Came out to price 10 days ago.I Haven't heard from him since.

Same story when redecorating a bedroom a couple of months ago. One no show, one never heard from again. So bloody infuriating! 4K sitting in the bank and nobody seems to want it.

have a rule that I don't chase tradespeople. I will ring and/or text a couple of times to firm up dates if necessary, but that's it. Either they want the work or they don't

That's the approach I generally take but now I'm wondering if there's some unwritten rule that we should be chasing more (though I did actually chase three times with my windows example).

If you're so over run with business then why advertise?

You can't just "turn off" your advertising. Newspaper and magazine adverts are usually booked long term, i.e. 3 months for a newspaper or a full year for a monthly magazine/newsletter. Yellow Pages is yearly as are most other paper and online directories. Websites are virtually permanent as it would knacker your google ranking if you kept changing it or kept taking it down!

Most new business start ups invest heavily in advertising up front so may be caught out if they get more business than they expected. All business has to think long term, so there will always be peaks and troughs. You can't just think "oh dear, I've no work next week so I'll put an ad in the village newsletter" - it could be 2-3 months before it would be published!

Any one-man/small business is a juggling act as to job scheduling as you're always dependant on other people. If others don't do their bit on time, or if your suppliers don't deliver on time, not only is the current job delayed, but that has a knock on effect on subsequent jobs. People don't realise how hard it is to keep on top of things and keep the work going until they do it themselves.

So a lot of these one man bands must be making very good money - they could provide gainful employment for someone to do admin for them, etc.

they could provide gainful employment for someone to do admin for them, etc.

If it wasn't for the costs, risks, bureacracy etc., they'd love to! I've had loads of trades clients who've wanted to take on staff, but been put off by the lack of meaningful help/support and frightened stiff of the risks of being sued for something or other. It's a massive learning curve to take on your first employee. All that time and cost to set up procedures, contracts, payroll, EL insurance, policies, etc., is money lost to a tradesman when he's not doing his real work.

Were project managing a large extension ourselves

That's you problem right there

No decent trade wants to be 'managed' by someone who thinks they know best after watching a few episodes of grand designs.

Trades have to work with other trades, closely, for jobs like extensions. A clueless householder playing project manager makes this impossible. Get one contractor who will manage the work and coordinate the other trades using their wealth of contacts and experience.

It's not really a 'problem' for us, Forever. It just takes a bit more time to line up the trades. We've successfully hired people for the demolition and foundations. The timber frame company are due to start on schedule and then we have contacts lined up for the roofing, sliding doors, skylight and polished concrete floor. DH will be doing all of the internal fit out himself, including plumbing, electrics, carpentry and tiling. The only sticking point at the moment is finding a bricklayer.

It's a double storey extension in London. To hire a builder to complete the whole job would have cost in the region of £200k. We'll bring it in for around £100k with a pretty high spec interior.

Hardly clueless.

Ok then...

Good luck with that!

Sorry I'm no expert but 100k, for a double height extension in London??

I'll eat my hat!

Morris She said her DP was doing the internals, so that's quite feasible if it's a site with easy access.

My BIL has retrained as a plumber. He also is now qualified in gas and electrics, so he can do jobs that some plumbers wouldn't be able to. After a couple years he is now adequate at carpentry which he used to be clueless at and had to turn down various jobs initially as he wouldn't be able to do the making good required.

There's a lot of admin, a lot of phone calls, and some days he quite simply doesn't have the time to call back 50 people when he couldn't help them in their timescale anyway. He does make big efforts to deal with emergencies and if you leave a message saying 4-6 weeks' time would be great, he's likely to pencil you in. He's got a couple apprentices /assistants and apparently it's as much admin work as being a teacher was...

We ended up contracting all the trades when our builder vanished - 9 years on we have a good network for guys to do most things, but even they cant find a good tiler!

Morris, I don't have the budget sheet but this is a rough breakdown:

Architect plans and building control: £3.5k, demolition and foundations: £15k, Timber Frame: £23k, brickwork: £12k (possibly less and a fair chunk of the bricks will be used from the demolition), rooflight: £3k, slimline sliding doors: £8k, roofing: £5k + (bit of a guess but most elements have been covered by the timber frame), polished concrete floor: £7k, sash windows and carpet for first floor bedroom: £4k. That leaves around £20k for the kitchen interior and furniture.

DH and I will do the kitchen fitting and he'll do the underfloor heating, electrics and plumbing. Access is ok as it's detatched. Units will be IKEA but we have a company lined up to make bespoke shaker doors. A fair chunk will go on cabinet hardware, quartz worktop and appliances as I'm not scrimping on these. We'll probably go into our 10% contingency as I've missed off a few things like council planning costs, skip and loo hire etc. That's all for 60 square metres, with a kitchen measuring 8.5m X 5m.

Am I missing something, Morris? I could well be! I won't put an estimate on the cost to my sanity (as we've also spent the last 2 years renovating the rest of the house ourselves). The extension should be easy in comparison as having people do the work for us is a huge novelty!

I agree totally. Tradesmen are a nightmare , especially in the north of he U.K. Less so in the south. Anyway, how do you post a new thread on this form? I desperately want to find out what the approximate price that is that I should be paying for an extension to my house, but can't find the "post "button anywhere? All I can find is a button to reply to post that already exist.

ForeverLovingMyArse
I would love to hire someone who can liase with everyone and leave me to get on with everything else but I find it hard to get one trade in on there own let alone trying to get another person coming to do work.

Oliver, even if you did have one builder/contractor managing the trades there's no guarantee that things would run smoothly. The "Home Extensions 2017" thread is sadly riddled with delays, legal action and sacked builders ... Very glad we're not going down that route.