I hate nobbing builders...

[Brian Gaff]

Sounds like an opportunity for a person to design a kind of lego build it yourself roof system!

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

I think its the time of year that the Eastern European roofers go back home for a couple of months so they can reclaim the tax they paid in the UK.

Brian

[Tim Watts]

Possibly. If I could find a couple of Polish roofers I'd have them over the English anyday - at least that's been my experience of the polish - quiet, hard workers and careful.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

A roofer paying tax? ;-)

[Tim Watts]

I just had a new candidate around for a quote - obviously a "posh" firm used to doing character/conservation housing.

Spent half the time telling me that the last guy was doing everything wrong and how much of a nicer job they could do ;->

Think I will now ring the guy in Battle and go on ebay for a defibrillator for when today's quote comes in...

[Andrew Gabriel]

A builder told me, drive around your area looking for a house having its roof done, and go and talk to the roofer. Don't be surprised if he says he's booked for next 4-6 months, but he should be able to come and give you a quote or rough idea anyway.

Just did this with a friend's house - the roofer we found is booked until February next year. However, he has popped around and patched up a couple of leaks until then, so we're trusting he will turn up to do the work.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Brian Gaff writes

Not going to help Tim, but, confined to bed with severe sciatica, I actually watched Tommy Walsh and his 60K house.

Couple of bits I noticed... I don't think they bothered to paint the underside of the steel beam which was supposed to have two coats of black paint!... the other was the metal battens used for the slates; both horizontal to hang and a short vertical to space and provide weatherproofing. Must save on slate.

[Tim Watts]

Quoting in large numbers is a fascinating exercise...

Incidently, I did a quick reckon up using online suppliers and I think my roof will require about £5300 worth of materials etc, inc VAT, not inc the discount I'm sure roofers can get. So with labour and allowing that they can probably reduce the materials prices below and I may have overestimate the amount of lead flashing, I reckon a final quote in the 9k region would be reasonable for 2 men for 2 weeks.

Hipped tiles (Redland Grovebury interlocking concrete) £809.21 Dormer tiles (Redland plain concrete) £408.41

75mm Celotex (ebay, "new" grade) £864.00 50mm Celotex (ebay, "new" grade) £198.00 Ridge tiles (for hips too) £246.40 Flashing 240mm x 6m rolls £570.00 Membrane (Tyvek) £244.80 Cedar 6x1" planks for gutterboard £355.92 Scaffold (guestimate of scaffolder who was here yesterday)£900.00 Skip £250.00 Misc £500.00

The job spec is strip, insulate, mebrane, gutterboard (not soffits, not refit gutter - I will reclaim my ali guttering and refit myself as well as fit soffits 'cos it's easy but boring for roofers) and tile+flashing.

Here's a quick summary of quotes:

0) Various people who came and did not quote or could not be arsed to come...

1) (Original lineup) discounted for wanting over £15000. Was full of good ideas though like using interlocking tiles and me fitting windows at the same time.

2) (Original guy booked for job) £9000.

3) Saturday's quote - no quote yet. Sniffed when I wanted interlocking tiles and wanted to redo the flat dormer roofs as he reckoned it would be hard to mesh the existing felt with lumpier hip roof tiles. Seems serious about quoting, sent scaffolder around yesterday who gave me the 750+VAT guesstimate when I asked out of interest (that's one lift of 2m or so around a perimeter of about 40m.

4) Today's bloke - young (= actually doing work, not standing around directing it) pleasant, seemed competant and said there would be no problem leaving the felt dormers alone while using wavy interlocing tiles on the hipped roof - in total contrast to quoter 3. Reckons he could start in 3 weeks or so.

Did say if I did fancy getting the dormers redone whilst they had scaffolding and bits off, butyl rubber would cost me about 800 (+VAT I expect which is tempting as the felt is in its last 5 years.

5) To come by later today.

6) To come by next Sat - but could not start until next year.

So if nothing else, having lots of quotes has allowed me to refine the specification considerably and to conclude that some of they talk bollocks...

[Tim Watts]

Quote just arrived - came in at a botty wibbling 19k.

What planet are these people on? I do not believe it was a FO quote because he sent the scaffolder around to measure. 5k materials, 14k labour for a 2 week job???

Oh well, lets see what nos 4+5 come in at.

[tony sayer]

Thats sound like a " we're too busy at the moment for that job so quote him silly money and if he's daft enough to accept then we'll have a bloody good earner on that" Quote....

[Tim Watts]

Could be - still surprised he wasted the scaffolder's time - with that markup, he could have guessed a random number (say 500) and however much he'd been wrong would have been irrelevant in the markup.

If they are too busy - why not just say so - or give a reasonable quote with a "can do it from March next year".

It will only take a few people to blog these sorts of quotes with teh name of the firm attached and they could see a marked downturn in future enquiries...

There definately is a very big hole in the Internet for a *single* well done and ubiquitous trader review site.

Come to think, a product review site that allowed made it easy to check what people thought of their product after X years use - this would be a great leveller of manufacturers pushing crap while trading on badge engineering.

Of course, neither is simple as relying on punters to accurately represent a single trader or classify a product correctly into a reasonable small but sufficiently distinct categories is extremely difficult. Sounds like a job for Google (thus solving the ubiquitous part).

[John Rumm]

Quite possibly...

The hard bit is getting something that can't be gamed... either vendors doing glowing reviews of themselves or negative ones of competitors, and in a more general sense avoiding the usual self selection bias of these things (i.e. those with a complaint are far more likely to leave a review than those who are happy). Put that into the context of not knowing the size of the customer base of the vendor, and it gets hard to get meaningful results.

[tim.....]

And as soon as there is there will be another 17 copycats and we'll be back where we started.

I actually thought that they was *one* semi official site backed by some government body,

but I Googled for a trader the other day (DG AIH) and I got a dozen of them (trader review sites, not DG companies)

tim

[tim.....]

I went to one last week and every single trader has scored 9.9 or 10.0.

I never give anyone a 9 or a 10 for doing the job right, they have to go the extra mile on everything (such as making the tea themselves) to score that highly. I can't be the only one this stingy with my praise :-)

tim

[Tim Watts]

Yes.

tripadvisor.co.uk comes to mind of a similar venture.

Hotels are represented exactly once (eg Premier Inn, South Blossom St, York has one entry, not half an entry shared with the Blossom St North one or 3 entries because someone could not spell "Premier" or "Blossom").

Guess thye must have an editorial team - my reviews took a few days to appear.

It's gamable, superficially - not sure how they deal with that...

I was thinking that a Trader's review site would be almost the same - except that ideally you would have links to names previously traded under (for name hoppers).

Products is much harder. I want to know about Current Product X specifically, but the only reviews I would have would tell me if it did the job OK out of the box. To determine if it is going to blow up at 13 months old, I need to see the reviews of products by the same manufacturer in the same function group from various times of their life. Managing categories is going to be very much harder and getting people to review a product they've had for 2,3,4 years will be much harder than, say, Argos sending an email to someone they know has just bought the product, requesting a review.

[Tim Watts]

Possibly - but Google Shopper does not really have any competition - at least not that are worth a damn.

?

Seems useful but not ubiquitous - not sure who runs it. I've taken one person from their lists for a quote (which is to come).

[Tim Watts]

Ah - self selecting. You have to sign up and be vetted as a trader.

OK - so useful in as much as people who care about their reputation will use it - but it will not list useless oiks.

[djc]

Tripadvisor reviews can be unreliable, you have to factor in the probable personality and taste of the reviewer. In the case of hotels; if Amercians don't like it I probably will.

And if the product was good four years ago that dosn't mean current production is the same.

[tim.....]

What annoys me about it is people who go and stay in 2 star hotels in developing countries paying perhaps 15 dollars per night, who then post on TA - 2 out of 10, complaining that it didn't have any of the feature you'd expect in a 4 star hotel at 150 dollars per night.

IMHO reviews should be relative, only an idiot books into a 15 dollar hotel in a developing county expecting air con and mini bar. So you need to know how it compares on the basics, i.e. was it clean!

tim

[Jonathan]

Trip Advisor is much abused by customers and the businesses which is why I won't put my holiday lets on it.

Jonathan