Building work gone wrong. What chance have we got at compensation?

[roobledoo]

At my wits end and look for advice from someone who has dealt with bad building work!!

We started building work on our house in Sept 2019, I was 6 months pregnant at the time (ground floor single story extension), the builder we went with quoted us £35k for the finished job & said he would be done by December (I was due early Jan 2020)

Things started to go badly once the extension had been built and it came to finishing touches (flooring/plumbing/kitchen fitting) it soon became very apparent that the team our builder used were incompetent and not skilled to do the job required.

There are so many awful things that happened over the timescale of him working but to cut a very long story short, we decided about 3 weeks after our daughter was born to cut our losses and source other tradesmen to finish the terrible job the original builders had done - I won't detail all the things that he didn't do correctly but the straw that broke the camels back was the boiler flue he installed that was illegal and fumes were entering our baby girls bedroom (she was not sleeping in there at the time thank heavens) we were also left without heating in January when my baby girl was 2 weeks old.

We are now in a financial situation where we have spent roughly £10-15k fixing issues the original builder left us with. We attempted several times to get him over to discuss our issues and ask him to resolve but he would makes excuses, never show - he once even left mid conversation and left our front door wide open!! I mean I am talking about a real dodgy one here (hindsight is a wonderful thing)

So we are now in a position where the work has been completed (only 6 months over the original time frame!!) but this has ruined us financially and with a 6 month old to think about this is obviously not ideal.

We are thinking that we would like to attempt to reach out to our builder one last time (by letter) to breakdown all the costs incurred and ask for a partial refund on the Incompleted/substandard work he did for us. We have got this backed up by all other tradesmen that have come to fix his botched job who have provided reports/photos and invoices. I am thinking to give him a timescale in which to respond and if he chooses not to/if we are not satisfied with his response we will take it further (citizens advice/trading standards)

Just wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation and if you have any advice for us before we embark on this. This has literally been the most stressful time for us as a couple and to be honest I don't really want to go after him but I don't want anyone else to suffer what we have been put through & financially we have to at least try.

Thanks in advance xxx

Christ. Have you not yet put it in writing??????

What was his quote/estimate?

Get a GSE ( Gas safe engineer) in to check and quote - IN WRITING - and then use this against the original cowboy

Other than that, small claim court

Do you have legal expenses insurance on your house policy? Or yes small claims online if sub £10k

Small claims court. Follow the procedures correctly and if necessary see it through the small claims. It’s easy to do. We’ve done it over a tradesman and I feel it was worth it.

Small claims court process is easy to use. I’d keep to £10k claim in order to use that path. Make sure you document your claim succinctly and add photos and evidence. Before submitting the claim, you need to try to resolve/settle with the builder first. Write to him and set a timeline (send recorded delivery). Good luck OP! Sounds so stressful.

I took a company to small claims court for damage they caused to my property, but that was only £600. I got my money back as the director didn’t want a CCJ against the company.

Did you have a contract with your builder? The dispute resolution pathways will be set out in the contract.
We had to do this and we were theoretically awarded all the money we were out of pocket. The builder however declared himself bankrupt so we never saw a penny.

The process was fairly straight forward, and we were able to do the paperwork etc ourselves.

Good luck.

If the builder goes bankrupt, presumably it will show up on the Companies House record when they next start up a company?

The window company we got a quote from went into liquidation. Thankfully before we paid any deposits, but it seems that the director did this last time and just set up another company. So I want to do lots of research in case I come across such an unscrupulous asshole again!

Report him to trading standards. It's illegal to do gas work 8f not Gas Safe qualified and registered.

Thank you so much for all your responses, this has helped in our decision making of the next step to take. It is great to hear some of you have had success in reclaiming money.

Best wishes to you all xx

+1 for small claims but warning.

Used it for roofer who charged us 28k, did not fix roof/leak/chimney, stole lead etc, and we asked for 10k back so we could use online system. Judgement awarded for us. Roofer ceased trading and then later started trading under different name and ignored judgement. I could send in bailiffs I think, but he lives with GF and seems to not have his own van in his own name... So he has a CCJ against him, but wedon't have any money back.

It was cathartic though.

@agonyauntie2020 You will only have a CCJ if he was self employed. You said he ceased trading which would suggest he was a limited company...in which case the CCj is useless as it is registered against the company and not him. Nearly all builders operate as limited companies so if he does go bust then not much you can do.

OP will need to evidence the claim though re poor workmanship and as someone else said a report about unsafe flue etc....if it was. Was the workmen Gasesafe registered?

Has the Op paid all the bill? Was there not provision to hold back payments which is what I had in our contract...20% holdback until 14 days after issue of building control cert and completion of the job. Didn't need to use it thankfully

@MarieG10
Yes you're quite right. I used the wrong terms. After we got the CCJ he took down his web pages, disconnected his phone and we couldn't get in touch with him. I noticed recently he's got them up again and obviously started working again. His professional organization had said they chucked him out, and he's got them listed on his web pages again. They were no real help. I could send the bailiffs (I think you have to get some paperwork from the high court then you can go that route) but he doesn't have any assets or even a permanent address so... But for us, writing down everything we'd paid him and commissioning a report showing he hadn't done the things he said he'd done and what he had done was completely bodged, it all helped and when we won the CCJ we at least knew it went against his name and he won't be able to get credit easily (we hope). Cathartic. And if anyone looks him up, hopefully it's searchable against him (not that we knew how to do that before we hired him, but others might...)

Don’t go to citizens advice. You just do t learn from your mistake do you? Get yourself a lawyer who has experience in construction law (it’s quite convoluted so you want someone who knows what they’re doing). I would also suggest you do this sooner rather than later (people like this often do a few shit jobs before winding up their company and while that won’t prevent a claim necessarily it makes things harder). Happy to recommend some one of you want, but just trust me on this one and don’t get cheap legal advice, the variation in quality in the legal industry is huge.

Should hasten to add that if a lawyer suggests you go straight to court you need to ditch them immediately and go to someone else. The aim in these kinds of cases should always be to scare them into a reasonable settlement and then only proceed to court/via the mediation route if it’s in your contract or whatever dispute resolution method you’ve got as a last resort after ring reasonably confident that there is enough money in the company/individual to make it worthwhile.

Dream ok if you think your'll get any success. Most don't. They just ignore the small claims and set up another company - PL limited number 2, number 3, number 4 etc.

But at least your'll know you did everything you could.

Don’t forget that a lot of smaller companies rely on word of mouth to get business, so I’d do the opposite and make sure you warn others about this feckless character. The whole setting up new companies is diabolical!

I’ve seen similar on our local Facebook pages, e.g. “please be warned about xx, we hired him through his company xx to xx. When we tried to pursue him for damages/shoddy workmanship, he dissolved the company and set up as a new one called xx.”

Whilst you won’t get money back, at least you know you’ve helped others who might fall victim.