TMH :-)
Woman next door has just had a new toilet and wash basin fitted by a local handyman.
Ripped the old toilet and washbasin out,fitted the new ones and a new collar for the toilet to waste pipe.
All for £60,she supplied the Toilet and Washbasin plus taps.
Just inspected the work for her and its 100% good job.
Shame he doesn't have the sense to charge a decent price. Not far off a days work, allowing for snags - you would need to book a day just in case.
So, assuming he works 6 days a week, his total turnover is £18K a year - less expenses. Lucky if he ends up with minimum wage.
Trust he is fully insured, pays Income Tax & NI, taxes & insures his vehicle properly etc.
Thank heavens I sell my services for what they are worth. I charge 2.5 times what he does & am fully booked until the middle of April, with jobs coming in every day.
The man is clearly an idiot.
He does work for a firm so weekends are a side line for him. Started 9 this morning and finished 2 o'clock this afternoon,I must say I thought £60 WAS cheap for what he did and was a bit dubious about his workmanship but I had to take me hat off to him for a perfect clean job.
Seems he's in demand according to my neighbour.
He would be at those prices - £12 an hour. No PL insurance, firms van or uninsured car (not insured for business use), not paying tax or NI.
I lose the odd job to people like this, but I aint bovvered, I'm busy enough at my prices.
Doesn't sound like a very fair comparison to me.
The guy's clearly working for 'cash in hand' - so he's not only fiddling the tax system, but the customer's lacking the sort of backup that they should expect from a 'proper' tradesman. (Suppose there's an emergency during the week - when he's doing his day job. Can he drop everything and get round to fix it ? Doubt it..)
There's always somebody who can do something 'cheaper' - but there must be a good reason why it's cheaper. Cheaper doesn't always mean 'better value'
This fellow has no financial outlay (your friend provided the new fittings), no overheads (possibly using firm's transport, tools - maybe even materials) and not a large outlay on marketing himself (as it seems he's working for beer money - and get paid by his employers for his real job).
Nothing against the guy - good luck to him - but it's not really comparing like with like, IMHO
Adrian
================================== The fact is that there's a thriving 'cash-in-hand' market and always has been. It's usually a mutually satisfactory arrangement, it caters for the lower end of the market and despite some extreme examples of bad or dangerous workmanship there seems to be little trouble from the arrangement.
Many of the worst examples of poor /dangerous / overpriced work come from properly self-employed traders in expensive vans who simply decide that life as a rogue trader is far more profitable than honest workmanship.
Cic.
Sadly whatever your industry you'll always lose some work/sales to someone else working on minimal margins. Generally speaking these people don't stay around very long, but hurt the whole sector while they are around.
You mean income tax ?
Emergency measure brought in to pay for the Boer war I thought
... which they omitted to repeal
Rogue governments, that's what I say
Was there any making good to do, such as tiling around and up to to the wash basin and the WC ?
The sanitary chinaware can be fixed first and the tiles run up to it, or the whole area tiled and the china fixed on top. Fashions change but in my 31 year old house between the bathroom and downstairs toilet we've had each method done twice.
The point is that completing such little attentions to detail can take much more time than the functional part of the job.
Given half a chance tradesmen will leave you, the customer, to do the lions share of the most difficult work yourself, such as refixing vertical blinds and making good the plaster around the units when DG units have been replaced.
A Granite fitter we employed would fit the new underslung sink (he had to) but not pipe up to the new sink.
Result : Overflow on main sink "inutile", empties down back of sink into cupboard below, and there's no room to get purpose made overflow connector in.
DG
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================================== I thought that Income Tax was introduced to finance the Napoleonic wars, but I wasn't thinking of Income Tax in any case. I was thinking of that (hopefully) small section of traders who persistently and deliberately demand extortionate rates for their services. They know they will always manage to catch the unwary and uninformed. That is the kind of dishonesty that does nobody any good.
Cic.
I do not think you lose any jobs to these people as thay would never call you in the first place. My apprentice does this type of job at the weekends. Usually his jobs are found by word of mouth or via relatives etc.
He probably does one job per weekend on the side at £12 per hour or hopefully more (no doubt using some of my kit) but this does not bother me.
Adam
Perhaps when he is better known he'll put his rates up.
Andy
Unless they are some retired guy who is topping up his income...
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