I have recently had the misfortune to have had some rather poor roofing work done on my house.
I wanted someone to replace our soffits and barge board as well as re- engineering and re-roofing our lean-to (or conservatory, as the estate agents put it). After a lot of effort looking and talking to roofers I found someone who seemed to actually understand what I wanted done with the lean-to roof. His quote was the most expensive - however he genuinely seemed like a good sort with a reputation he would want to look after - so I hired him.
A bad sign, that sort of went over my head, after I had sent him a letter agreeing to his quote was that he said he wanted to be around when work started on the lean-to roof. What he actually meant, it seems, was that he was passing the soffit and bargeboard job off to subcontractors and intended to have as little to do with it as possible.
Scaffolding was put up around the house. Our phone line was detached to make way for the scaffolding and nailed down to boards on top of the scaffolding. The roofers came and ripped off the old soffits and barge boards. I wasn't around to see this. However, on the following Saturday, my neighbour came round to see me to tell me that he had found debris in his drive and he had had to pull out a load of waste material from between my garage and his fence. It seems that the roofers had seen the space between the garage and his fence as a good place for this rubbish. The fact that some of it was landing in my neighbours drive strongly indicates that the roofers were throwing it off the scaffolding onto the roof of our garage so that it, they hoped, would slide neatly down into the gap.
Luckily, the scaffolders were not quick to remove the scaffolding after the replacements for the soffits and bargeboards went up. I was able to inspect the work. I found that the capping tiles on both hips had slipped considerably and the capping tiles above the newly cemented-in ones were considerably disturbed. Another thing I noticed was the distinct orange/yellow colour of the cement compared to the light grey colour of the old cement. I wondered, momentarily, if it was possible that too much sand had been mixed into it - but immediately decided that anyone who had ever done any roofing before surely wouldn't make such a basic and bad mistake. Also, I noticed that a broken tile at the back of the roof that should have been replaced was left untouched.
I contacted the roofer to express my concerns. He said that he would delay the removal of the scaffolding. He told me that when this sort of work was done that it was inevitable that nearby capping stones would get disturbed. He told me that I would have to get the whole roof re tiled at some point. He then dispatched an invoice to me for =A3800 + VAT to reseat all of the ridge and hip tiles. On receiving this invoice I rang him up and convinced him that it would be a better idea for him to just get the work he had been contracted to do put right at no further expense to myself. He came around and had a look at the state of the work. Speaking about where one of the capping tiles had slipped, he said he thought that the gap had been made on purpose by the sub-contractor with a trowel. I replied telling him that I thought that that would have been a very strange thing for the sub-contractor to have done. Anyway, it turned out that some time later the capping tiles were re-seated and the cracked tile was replaced. However, I noticed that they were re-seated with same strange coloured cement.
The scaffolding stayed up for quite a long period of time. Eventually, when we got back from holiday, we found that it had gone. What we had gained though, was a waterfall where the down pipe was. The down pipe should have been cleared but was now more blocked than it ever had been. Also, there was a gaping hole in the lean-to roof - presumably knocked into it by the scaffolders. The next morning (a Monday), I noticed that the phone cable, rather than having been re-attached to the house in anything like a satisfactory fashion, had simply been hooked onto the hip iron.
I phoned up the roofer to complain about the down-pipe, the hole in the lean-to roof and the state of the phone line. He apologised profusely and told me that someone would come and sort them as soon as possible. He had actually promised me some weeks earlier that he would come round on that day to start work on the lean-to roof. The news he gave me was that he couldn't and that he would be on holiday the following week.
A little later that day, a neighbour who is in the building trade called by. He was shocked both by the poor level of service and the poor quality of work that had been done. He pointed out that:-
1) Some tiles at the back of the roof weren't settled down flat where they met the facias.2) There seemed to be material missing above the upstairs windows. The barge boards were warping and sagging slightly at these points.
3) Shreds of protective film that should have been removed from the new material were still visible making the work look untidy.4) He also told me that it looked like that roofers had used a weak mix of cement to fix the capping tiles in place.
My neighbour also warned me to check to make sure that the roofer wasn't going to try and hit me with any extra charges for the scaffolding which had been up, by then, for a considerable length of time. I did this. The roofer told me that he was still working to the quotation.
On Tuesday no repairs were made and it rained heavily.
On Wednesday, the phone line was sagging so precariously between our house and the telegraph pole that I rang up BT and asked them to get an Engineer out to fix it. I rang the roofer up and left a message for him to say that he would be footing the bill. When we got home that day, the phone line had been fixed by the BT engineer (who had left a note), the down pipe had been cleared and temporary fix had been made to the lean-to roof. These had been done by a colleague of the roofer. I was glad these fixes had been made because I had been steeling myself to tell the roofer never to set foot on my property again.
Unhappily, though, I am still desperately hoping that the roofer will do a satisfactory job with our lean to. It took me quite a lot of time and effort to find somebody who seemed to understand what I wanted done. And the year is wearing on. What chance would I have of getting a satisfactory outcome now, if sacked the current roofer and started looking for another one?