Damage to Monitor by Carpet Fitter

Kayulzz

user1977 said:

Alderbank said:

Kayulzz, what about the advice from me and others to claim on your household insurance?

That's what it's for.

But worth it for a £200-300 claim? That's barely more than the excess of many/most policies.

Yeah the excess on my insurance is £250 so not worth it. I think I'll just have to chalk this down to experience and not be an idiot next time we have someone come to do work for us.

Manxman_in_exile

I suppose it's understandable if you've never had experience of this before, but if you think about it, to lay a fitted carpet in a room the fitters need access to the whole floor.  So really everything either needs to be taken out of the room (ideal) or will have to be moved around the room as they attempt to work round the furniture etc (not ideal).

And if they are fitting out more than one room (or the whole house!) then furniture needs to be moved around constantly from room to room as they progress, and sometimes might be left in places where it can easily be knocked over etc.

I'm pretty certain that every time we've had carpets fitted that it's said somewhere in the small print that it was our responsibility to make sure the fitters had access to a room cleared of furniture.  As it happens, we haven't always done that,and have sometimes relied on the fitters to move stuff around - which they are generally happy to do.  But in that situation, if they broke something, I think I'd accept that as my responsibility and not theirs.

If you leave something fragile on a desk or a table in a room that's about to have a carpet fitted, I think it's asking for trouble if you don't move it to a safe place yourself.  If you argue that the fitters said it was "OK", I'd suspect they'd reply that you asked them to move stuff and it was at your risk.

If you've just moved into your first house, it's probably just one of many lessons you'll learn in the first year or so!