So the house project still rumbles on...I can't believe its been 6 months now and still no sign of being done yet.
(earlier post: http://col-zone.blog.co.uk/2008/10/23/big-house-project-4918328/)
All the while we've been paying our builder as we went, but as we got close to the end, we said we'd pay the last part (~10% of the total) as soon as he finished.
The downside is that he seems to have taken this as a sign that he no longer needs to finish the job, and instead of being on site most of the time, has barely been seen. Which wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't some big jobs left to complete. Like the roof - which has plastic sheeting over sections instead of slates, and the doors - which we have the glass for, but not the frames or doors themselves. Each time we ask him to give us a finish date he says "next week" - which would be pretty hard to believe even if he did actually show up.
I've discussed this with a few of my mates/family and all are of the opinion that its always very tricky to get a builder to complete anything whatsoever. One of my friends paid a premium to a builder so that he was exclusively on her job from start to finish...and he kept swanning off to other sites without any sign of embarassment.
The one slight upside of the whole thing is that our builder lives on our street, as does our architect. the downside is that we've heard that one of our other neighbours is no longer speaking to the builder as he still hasn't finished a job he started for them before Christmas too.
Ho hum.
