Mediation as a first option?

jandroo · 3 May 2020 at 9:40AM

Hi, I wondering if anyone has any ideas on where we go next.

We employed a building company to renovate our house and the work started in October. There was no one on site for weeks and work was extremely slow, when they did show up-they would often only work one or two days a week or a few hours a day. We accepted this at first as they had started on converting the garage so didn’t have too much of an impact. The entire job was supposed to take 14/16 weeks but 12 weeks in they were still working in the first room.

The first problem came when the windows installed were the wrong colour (grey) and the builder said we’d ordered them when what had actually happened was he’d emailed my husband to say he was going to order them. He said to let him know if they’re wrong, but my husband didn’t read the email. The instruction has been to match the original windows in the rest of the house (a stone cottage) and initially they were supposed to re-use a brown window taken out of the side of the garage; they’ve never told us why this didn’t happen.

After a long list of problems and every deadline missed we asked them not to come back after Christmas and they finished on the 19th Dec.

From 10th Dec onwards we were asking them to fix the leaks on the doors and windows they installed. All the windows and the bifold door leaked every time it rained and we allowed them to keep coming back until mid Feb to try to fix the problem. It wasn’t fixed and they all still leak at the first sign of rain.

The list of mistakes/problems is long; we paid £20k but according to the builder there is still £16k owing. He often sends invoices and yesterday sent a new one for £2.5k taking us to £18.5k owing; the latest invoice includes things we didn’t ask them to do.

We were supposed to go to mediation but I’m so fed up now I don’t want to have to deal with him but not sure what we can do. As well as the leaks, the new builder we employed doesn’t think they’ve insulated the room (it’s on the plans to do so) and we are still finding things that are wrong/missed 5 months after they’ve left. We can’t tile or paint until we try to work or where the leaks are coming from so 7 months on we’ve still not finished the first room! We can’t get someone round to have a look at all the issues at the moment but the last invoice demanded payment next week so not sure what to do.

We had asked the builder to go to mediation to try to resolve the issue; he said he would rather not initially but agreed and he contacted someone. We were supposed to meet at Easter but this was cancelled; the mediator can meet via Skype/zoom but I don’t feel I’ll be able to really explain what been happening unless we meet in person so would rather wait.

Any advice on what we should do? Are we liable to pay the outstanding amount immediately even when we need to employ another builder to fix all the problems? The bifold manufactures came out and suggested we may need to take the bifold out to fix the problems.

Does anyone have any suggestions; should we continue down the mediation route and still go ahead with it during lockdown? Sorry for the long post, thank you for your input.

neilmcl · 3 May 2020 at 10:28AM

Can you please break up your post in to spaced paragraphs, at the moment it's just a big wall of text which will put others off from reading it all the way through.