Additional charges for decorating--advice sought

emspy12

Hello all,
I accepted a quote from a tradesman to redecorate my house. It is something I had been planning for a long time and finally I'd got my finances in order and taken out a low-interest loan to carry out the work. So I have been working to a budget. Having received his quotation I agreed to the price and adjusted my expenditure on other areas of my home improvement accordingly.

He started work and then found that it was more difficult than he had anticipated to prepare the walls--it's a Victorian house with many layers of old paper and distemper beneath. He decided he would need to strip them all off, so the preparation took much longer than he had anticipated.

He has now presented me with a request for an additional payment of £900 because of this work. I would like to know where I stand on this, since I personally could not have known the preparation aspect would be so tricky, and hired him because he was supposed to be expert on precisely these questions. I also feel that the entry for 'preparing all surfaces' in my quotation ought to cover the work necessary to do this even if it goes beyond what he had originally assessed.

On the other hand I do not want him to walk off leaving the job half-finished, it's just that I can't raise any more money. I have committed myself to other jobs that I thought I could afford on receipt of his original quotation.