Paying a "deposit" for building work?

baldelectrician

Sorry to the OP for going off on a tangent
socrates

To use 1 example, a LL i know (and have since told to use another electrician) had a consumer unit installed by another electricain I know ( was too busy at the time).
The LL bought a 16th edition consumer unit and the materials from a local wholesaler. He was informed the consumer unit would be out of date in 4 weeks (regs about to change) but bought a 16th Edition Unit anyway.
Mate installed shower cabling and fitted and tested consumer unit, noting lack of supplimentary bond in bathroom- ll had not bought bonding cable

Spin forward 8 months, I am doing LL check and fail property- no supplimentary bonding/ no total RCD bathroom protection.
Landlord takes a strop.

You may be a luvvly landlord, but I come across more landlords that don't care.
Was out at different LL tonight- he had booked in an inspection, test and smoke detectors. When I arrived he only wanted smoke detectors and we did those. When certing smoke detectors we noted live exposed cabling and 1" finger holes in top of consumer unit.
The local council person had told him it was not a legal requirement to have an electrical check, so he decided against as it would save money.
In Scotland it is a legal requirement to have the electrics in a safe and good working order, but you don't have to prove it :eek:
Tonights problem? Bad workmanship (from 1999) and a dodgy consumer unit. MCB of different make forced in to a non standard cheap unit (no spares available)


In essence the council lass told me that if the landlord 'thinks' all is fine (electrically) then they are happy with that !

Hector-The-Inspector_2

Pay NOTHING UP FRONT ever.


If they can't finance the work in hand their not good business people, they can ask you to sign a contract for their protection, they can also do a credit check if they wish. This backward country has very little legislation to protect the public from dodgy tradespeople taking deposits from gullable people who are conned every day :mad:

mando123

We are currently building a single storey extension (17 sqm). We have signed a JCT contract with a construction company and was told that we should pay 20% deposit. After we refused, the company told us that we will not have to pay anything upfront but at completion of each job, which was ok with us. The first invoice was sent to us after 1 week and included some work which has not even started or work that we didn’t quote for nor have been informed about. I have disputed the invoice and they amended it accordingly.

The 2nd invoice was sent again after 1 week. Meanwhile, when the builders were covering the foundations with concrete, they put massive concrete slabs (~40 cm/each) at the bottom of the foundation and then poured a very bad mixing of concrete (mixed with lots of water and balas). When we (employer) pointed out that we are not happy with the concrete slabs at the bottom and the ratio of 1:10 (cement/balas) the builders ignored us completely. After 2 days, we insisted to get the concrete redone. The engineer couldn’t find any solution to the bad foundations and adviced to get it redone properly. We even called the Council Building inspector to check the concrete foundations but the company insisted they will redo it at their own expense and that we should not call the council.
Fair enough. We decided to go ahead and dig out the foundations again.

When the 2nd invoice came (while still digging the concrete out ), it was for work & materials that should only start in 1 week time (meaning advance payment for future work). As the company was trying to blame someone for the bad foundations, they asked us to pay an advance payment to balance their accounts. We agreed to pay £1000 (50% less than requested) as credit towards future invoices. Unknowingly, the company than reduced the rate from future work which we had a very tight budget (kitchen, tiles, boiler) and not from the extension work. After pointing out that we will not pay extra for things we have budgeted in advance in order to balance their accounts (looks like they wanted us to pay for the bad foundations confusing the quote/invoice) we finally agreed to use the £1000 towards future invoices and leave the quote at its original price. The company now insists we have to pay for materials in advance which wasn't initially agreed.
As we don't know much about the JCT contract we have with them, it is mentioned we should pay upon receipt of the weekly invoice but not mentioned if it's for future work or for completed work.
We are not very comfortable working with this company for the whole project and want to cancel the contract after they build the basic extension. Has anyone any idea how do we terminate the agreement after 60% of the work is completed? Can we remove some work from the agreed quote if we get it cheaper for someone else to do it?
We are also concerned that the agreed quote is increasing by £1000 per week. We cannot afford to pay more than 10% over the agreed budget (max £5000 extra).

Can anyone give us some information or suggestions in our case?