Builders... are there ANY good ones?

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Gambit37
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Builders... are there ANY good ones?

Post by Gambit37 »

Just over a year ago we had an extension built on our new house. It was "finished" last December, 2 months late. Several jobs remained which could not be completed in the bad winter/spring weather, so we had to wait until April this year before work could continue.

The biggest job, rendering the outer walls, was finally completed in late July. We are still waiting for the last few things to be done, NINE MONTHS after the build was finished, and the builder continually fails to fully complete the job giving vague communication and never committing to it. Meanwhile he's employed new staff and is working on multiple jobs elsewhere. And yes, he's got most of the money from us.

Our builder is apparently "one of the best" in our area and is always busy due to word-of-mouth recommendations. And his work is very good -- when he's actually on site doing it. But everything around that: timeliness, communication, organisation - these have all been pretty shoddy. And now I'm utterly exhausted of it all. I just want the damn house finished!

Having spoken to many other people who have had building work done, it seems that NO ONE has had a job done that has gone according to plan.

It begs the questions:

* How does the industry get away with such bad customer service?
* Are all builders awful? (and if so, why?)

So I'm curious, if you've had building work done, how was it for you?
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Jan
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Re: Builders... are there ANY good ones?

Post by Jan »

Yes, I guess it's a very common problem. One of the reasons probably is that you are seen a small customer not worth the effort - if you were building a brand new large super-dooper hacienda you would have the company working on it round the clock.

More generally, our continent has too few manually working people, and particularly skilled manually working people (craftsmen, artisans etc.) - as a result, the builders have the upper hand over the customers. Europe is full of people with PhDs in sociology and gender studies but you can't find anyone to fix your bl**dy sink. I mean just ask anyone from the industry, from England and Germany to the Czech Republic and you'll always get the same answer - the biggest problem is the lack of skilled manually working people. Everyone wants to work as a white collar in the services, nobody wants to work manually - and those who do are simply not good enough.

I feel that it's actually worse in the western Europe. I have some friends working and living in the Brussels and they're simply fed up with all the builders and craftsman, who're too few and slow and not responding and simply not giving a sh*t. It was allegedly much worse before the EU enlargement / influx of workers from new EU-member states in 2004. My friend had a major WC leakage and when she called for someone to fix it they informed her that they'd send someone there "to look at it in a couple of weeks" (nobody ever arrived of course). She says the situation improved considerably when the Polish workers came but is still far from perfect.

I think it's somehow better over here. In Prague and other larger cities, most of the manual building work is done by foreign workers (mostly from Ukraine) - they are nice chaps, usually come on time and work very hard, but unfortunately they are far from skilled so they need a permanent supervision otherwise they screw things up. In smaller cities, most of the work is still done by locals, usually quite skilled although sometimes a bit lazy - again, a supervision is needed but they usually get things done. Personally, I've never had too big problems with builders / craftmen, althought the situation is far from perfect of course. But as a heritage of socialism, in order to get things done here, you have to know the right people, you must have good contacts and connections. Without contacts, it's all the question of luck here - you might be lucky and find a reliable good company by chance, but you might also get a bunch of ugly lazybodies just sucking your money. The biggest problem with building here is with the civil servants though - they're extremely slow, annoying and often waiting for a bribe. My brother asked for a permission to rebuild his house and after almost two years of fruitless bureucracy and an endless exchange of documents ("you can't have the door abover the staircase", "you can't have a door from the garage directly to the corridor", "this wall must be 20 cms higher") he finally revealed that the ladies at the office were actually waiting for a bribery offer. Of course it was not coming so he had to drop the whole idea and moved to another village that comes under the jurisdiction of a different office - now finally he has the permission and can start building a new house next year - but several years were wasted.
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