Handy man/decorator quite vs estimate where do I stand?

Airkraft

9abby wrote: »

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The lunatic is in my head u was paying him £150 per day plus the cost of any materials he bought ...

Oh, I missed this earlier confirmation of the contractual terms you agreed with this person.

The only question that now remains is why, if you were unhappy with his work, you continued to allow him to work for THREE weeks before now moaning.

9abby

Hi Airkraft,

I dont like the idea of getting into rows with people on line and the last couple of post of yours are suggestive that you might be a little angry. Normally I would just scroll straight past but, for the benefit of everyone else, i will try to answer your questions.
With regards to references i did nothing more than look at work and recommendations from his previous customers on his Facebook traders page. As stated earlier in this thread, his worked looked neat but this may have been because the houses he had worked on were new builds or at least all the rooms had clean fresh plastered walls etc my mistake maybe for not digging deeper but I felt as I was not asking him to build an extention or fit a kitchen for example, I wouldnt go far wrong.

In terms of communicating with him, this was also an issue I raised several times while he was here. I live in Wiltshire but work in reading. I leave arround 07:30 and generally get home around 19:30 so I am gone before he arrives and he is gone before I get home.
I would call him during the day several times and he wouldnt answer. When I asked him about this on his final day he said he never brings his phone into job sites because he doesn't like it being covered in dust.
I encouraged him from the start to leave me notes or email/message me if there was something he needed me to do when I got to enable him to do whatever task he might be doing but never received a single message. He carried on as though he had it under control.

I left him a note one day on the dining room table on top of a ceiling rose I wanted him to fit.
When I came home the note had moved but the ceiling rose was still on the table.

Like I said in the beginning he only started about 50 percent of the jobs and non were finished. Most of his work consisted of prepping areas such as adding small sections of plaster board to damaged walls etc so it was difficult to assess what the finished job would look like. The one room he did manage to paint was the one shown in this thread.

I also allowed him to co tune because I believed although he was behind schedule, i had no reason to believe he would not return after the 3 weeks had elapsed.

This thread is titled quote vs estimate. You are the second person I believe to say that he is working on a day rate and that's precisely the reason I started this post.
I asked him for a quote, I told him I needed a price to complete all jobs, we made a list of the jobs together. I told him because my hours are so long I just dont have the time or energy to do the work so the money I had saved but be well spent to get rid of the problem.
He has ignored all of this and appears to have sent me an estimate, I have foolishly gone ahead with his price but it is misleading because the covering email he sends with his price states that the price may change if he has no issues on sit. This indicates he is doing what I asked and quoting to complete all tasks. When I ask him to itemise the price so we both know what we should expect from one another he tells me he will do this once I have accepted the initial estimate. I do accept but still received no list detailing what he intended to achieve.

The more I reflect on this the more I come to the conclusion that I was foolish to allow him to start i should have demanded the itemized list. Hiwever, I was not dishonest, I gave him all the information to provide a quote and he has negotiated himself into doing precisely what I didnt want and that was to simply show up for 3 weeks and do what he can. I would never have signed up to that had he presented his price and covering email to me in the true light of what it was. I also believe to a certain extent that he did estimate it would take 3 weeks to do the whole job but had the ultimate get out of jail free card if things went wrong.

Anyway, I hope this answers everything and doesnt result in a slanging match

twang72

Looks like pretty poor workman ship to me, looks like since you were at work he could almost just wing it and still get paid for a sloppy job to me.

I still don't feel going the legal route is always the best way, if you can work out something in-between and a compromise or lesser labour cost, just solves headache for both sides but this is just my opinion.

Good on you for just getting parts of the work done yourself, I myself had to resort to DIY and frankly I know my job looks better and unlike the builders work it will actually last a life time.