Odd jobs for a living!!

Mrs_Vimes

SBOG - I'm really enjoying this thread. Thanks.

kezlou

sbog wiw thats great what you need for the ocmmunity, its a shame and shocking quite frankly that the council didn't sort it out. the budliea will look lovely when the buds come out. The council where i am are just as bad.

Hope you weren't offended when i said be careful regarding certain jobs i just wouldn't want you to get something like asbestos poisioning. Does that make sense

I for one think its great what he's doing, he's being and up front about what he's doing. For instance, clearing up the area for one cul de sac, paid £40 (not much at all), but managed to get fuel for his stove. All of which is being recycled and used within his home. I've been a carer and its a very hard job both mentally and physically. Coming home to warm front room wth a cuppa is heaven. Hope the weather clears up for you so ou can do the roofing job!

dawdlything - what you've got to think about is that lots of tradesmen have a lot of overheads which they have to fork out for. For instance a flue gas analyser can cost £600 up front, then say £200 per year to be recalibrated, which has to be done, its the law. People don't realise just how much one person has to be paid up front before they even start trading. All tickets have to paid , not cheap. Registration has to be for and thats not including insurances, tools, fuel etc Which is exactly what SBOG said.
Don't also forget when a quote is giving for installation of a central heating, more than two thirds of it will go on parts alone, not labour. Unfortunately people don't realise this and just think that tradesman are ripping them off instead.

patman99

There's nothing wrong in what SBOG is doing. However if he gets caught and investigated, he may well wish he had all the licenses and insurances needed.

Good luck to the man.

Jeanetteathome

jetplane wrote: »

SMOG you must be confusing me with someone else. I haven't whined about you not paying taxes, I haven't implied that I would shop you, I have made a valid point. End of.

Always worried when anyone uses the phrase *end of*. For someone not whining you sure have a lot of worries about licences and Sbog taking work of other people. If he was making 20K a year I think most would be worried but the small amounts here shouldn't worry anyone , in fact we should all applaud someone who is prepared to clean up those derelict areas that blight so many places. People always think it;s *someone elses* problem and with council strapped for cash and already hopelessly inefficient it's a recipe for disaster.

The councils rioghtly should be pursuing fly tippers and rogue tradesmen who rip people off. Neither of which Sbog are , indeed where he to live near me I would find work for him.

chiefgoobster

If you ask me there's too many do-gooders around all the time. If you ask me they need to wind their necks in and take a chill pill or 2. It's a tough ol' dog eat dog world out there at the moment.

If SBOG can scrape £20 from flogging off some old wood, a few unused bricks and , some Buddlia then bl**dy good luck to the fella. It strikes me that those who are whinging are only jealous becase they're not getting the slice of the cake as well !

Morethanconcerned

Should_be_out_gardening wrote: »

The thing is though there are few round here who will even look at samll jobs , it just isn't worth it. Now this waste thing has come up more than once - I'll tell you what I did last autumn.

I did some work for a bloke - pointing his garden wall and trimming some trees. I was working for him as he'd seen me doing stuff for his neighbours elderly parents and we got to talking. he lives in a little cul de sac, at the end of which is the railway line down and embankment and a road runs past it. There is this little triangle of land , cut off from the railwayline, seperaterd from the end of the road by bushes and the road by a tumbly down fence.

Now as happens in the less pleasant areas , the the fence on the road was pulled down and folk took to tipping and then youth and zipheads took to taking short cuts through the fence to the cul de sac. They drop little and are a nuisance as well as people have had stuff nicked and the bods have took off through the waste ground.

Now a few of the people on the road had complained to the council - not their land they said. They complained to the railway , not our problem it seemed. No one gave a damn.

I took a look and put to a few of them the idea I would clean it up , repair the fence trim the bushes and make a hedge . I had taken down a fence a while back and the panel was far too good to break so I kept it, I figured on using that to repair the main fence with concrete posts I also had put by.

I cleared the area of grotty rubbish , I got a fair few aluminium beer cans for my stock plus the added bonus of finding a large electrical extension lead on a coil with a stand plus a large roll of membrane the kind put on gardens under the chippings. Thsi must have been dumped their by thieves , they didn't belong to anyone in the cul de sac so I had them . The rubbish was bagged and put in the various wheelie bins around the road.

I put up the fence , I trimmed the bushes and spilt and twisted them together to make a natural barrier. I b=dug up and replanted some hawthorn and place that behind the fence , where the land backed onto one of the gardens I chopped back all the over growth, trimmed a lrge tree that had self set. I had my garden mincer thing there - electric by one of the residents (saves me using mine) chopped up all the bits and kept all the residue to for my compost heaps. All the wood I kept for fire wood.

Took about a day , they whipped together £40 all in . I got the wood, the stuff I found dumped, the beer cans which was about a bin bag full, I dug up a few small buddlia bushes which are all over wasteland and potted them for use in a blokes garden .

While I was there a bloke asked if I could take an old chest of drawers out of his garage. I thought to chop it for fire wood but it looked OK and I was reminded of a mate whose son ran a gym and they wanted to put in a smoothie bar, he'd said he wanted and old style drawer cabinet thing. I shoved it in the estate - if he didn't fancy it I could chop it.

Later at home I took a ,look and it was really OK , I asked him and he said it sounded fine so I sanded it down and put a couple of coats of gloss on it . he gave me £20 for it. Later in the moth when doing a garden I planted the two buddlia and the bloke gave me £10 for them. They look great and when they flower butterflies will come.

So thats £60 straight away that week with another tenner later , no waste , no mess. The fence is still in place , the bushes are budding right now so it's all good.

No one else would have taken that on .

Now this is just superb , this is the kind of thing we need to inject BACK into local communities. Everyone waits for the council or some one else to do it. This is why councils have grown huge and unwieldy with massive budgets but don't seem to be able to get things done at the very small level.

A tiny local community of a few people have come together and made their environment better, no one has been done out of a job I doubt ANY gardening company would touch this as it's not a garden, no builder would do it , plus if they did does anyone here really believe they'd charge £40? The thing is SBOG didn't even ask for a figure they whipped round for it. I don't know the area or the circumstances of the people but was that all they could whip round?

But thats not the point at all - the one key thing to remember is that SBOG pays his NI stamp and thats the key. From what I can gather here reading all through, I can't see him making enough to pay any tax on a self certificated form he fills in. Now if he was on 30K and drove a big car and lived in a big house then questions might be asked but I can't see the tax man finding much here to be honest.

This kind of small scale local community working is what we need more of in this country - the system is broken and it's not going to better itself on it's own.

Morethanconcerned

Should_be_out_gardening wrote: »

It's not always £10, I ask what I think they can afford so adjust accordingly. You make on one and onbly break even on another. The thing is I've done several thing like tidy up yards for businesses by goping in and asking the owner or manager if they'd like me to clean up for a tenner, now a tenner isn't much but £20 is. Often they'll have their own bods but sometimes they haven't and after a stormy day or in spring when the weeds start they are greatful.

Then I can ask if I could have that pallet, or if I see something that might need doing I might ask if it needs doing , I got some big 5 gallon tub things that had adhesive in one time and cleaned they were great, I got an tarpaulin which was OK.

You've got to be brazen and a bit cheeky , but always look smart and not rough as people are worried about people knocking on doors. I never cold call in the streets, only businesses.

If I see the council bods trimming the trees or cutting down an old tree I ask if I can have a pile of logs etc. They don't care and I get free logs that I can sell. I keep and eye out when building work is going on and ask If I can have the sand left over or the cement etc, often they are glad to be rid of it rather than them storing it.

It's very quiet at the moment, and mild too so I haven't sold as much wood. But i have some tree trimming later and when I pop into town I will look into any of the skips I see and look out for new ones, but I have to be quick as there are plenty of skip divers round here!

THIS is the kind of stuff the whole of society should be encouraging , recycling and entrepreneurship. I know you from the kleeneze thread and know how hard you work plus that you claim no benefits at all after being refused jobseekers years ago.

There are pople here all to quick to jump to regulations (which were suppodely put in place to pretect the enviroment but don't) or to say you take work from others. If you only did the one thing all day and were running as a company they might have a slight point but the utter variation of things you do from skip diving, gardening , wood cutting and selling , leaflet delivery, advertising boards, farm work , building work means no one is losing out, in fact the builders and roofers you work for get good workers they don't need to employ all the time when the going is bad ( good or bad that? I don't know) the farmer gets a good worker when he is busy and as for the kebab shop owner he wouldn't have employed a worker *just* to do that I don't reckon.

Morethanconcerned

chiefgoobster wrote: »

If you ask me there's too many do-gooders around all the time. If you ask me they need to wind their necks in and take a chill pill or 2. It's a tough ol' dog eat dog world out there at the moment.

If SBOG can scrape £20 from flogging off some old wood, a few unused bricks and , some Buddlia then bl**dy good luck to the fella. It strikes me that those who are whinging are only jealous becase they're not getting the slice of the cake as well !

I'm with you on that!

Reading the whole thread it goes from calling sbog a thief to worrying about tax, then after those are put to bed it moves to licenses and putting others out of a job.

None of the various accusations stand at all , it's worth noting as a long time browser of this whole forum that those thanking posts accusing sbog of this and that elsewhere make a big fuss about benefit claimants getting a raw deal. Seems hypocritical to bellyache for others on one hand then condemn a man who takes nothing (yet I feel he is entitled to the at least the most basic unemployment benefit) from the social pot and seeks to *actively* enrich the community around him.

Flummaxed

I just wanted to say to SBOG that I think what you're doing is fantastic. You're making a small 'living' for yourself, tidying up unsightly areas, recycling, improving the environment and not ripping people off in the process. I only wish I knew of someone like you in my area, and as others have said here, I don't feel I'm in a minority in that respect. What you are doing, in my opinion, is community spirited and environmentally friendly, innovative, entrepreneurial and even a bit brave.

There is so much litter, waste and just generally anti-social behaviour in today's society, but you are offering a service to people, which reminds me of what my grandad used to tell me about finding old wooden crates, chopping them up and delivering to people to use for firewood, back in the 1940s. It was hard work but it kept the wolf from the door, and people were grateful to receive a bit of cheap firewood to keep them warm in difficult times.

As far as I can see, the work that you're doing puts everyone in a win-win situation. We need more people like you to help re-build communities and for people to take pride in their local area. Well done for what you're doing and the best of luck for the future.

Maz

I think what SBOG is doing is fantastic and I wish he lived near me, I'd certainly take him on. I can't get anyone to do odd jobs for love nor money.

Don't suppose you live in Devon SBOG?