Building materials and receipts

DIY Guy · 16-07-2007, 08:51

ok, so here is a little peice of advice when dealing with builders and the materials needed to complete a job...

ALWAYS DEMAND RECEIPTS FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE INITIAL ESTIMATE!

I have a builder working for me at the moment, and in the course of the job to replace our entire bathroom it was discovered that our incoming water mains pipe needs replacing due to bad flow and a kinked lead pipe.

So my builder tells me he can replace the problematic section under our living room floor for £200 + £50 materials roughly he says...

Anyway, job done, 3 weeks go buy and I was in wickes picking up some postcrete (Which takes forever to set by the way) when I spotted rolls of this blue mains piping that my builder had used so I wanted to see how much he had spent because he made me listen to his bitching all day about the job...

So this 25m roll of 20mm pipe is only £14.99 which is pretty cheap but then it occurred to me that he had only used a few metres on my job, so wheres the rest of the roll?

Yesturday he came to see me so I asked him (Quite casually) "When are you going to drop off the rest of my 20mm blue pipe that you didnt use"?

Well, you could see by the look on his face I had rumbled him on it but he went and retreived it straight away for me and returned with it in a few minutes (He lives across the street)

So now I have enough blue pipe to also renew the entire incoming mains all the way to the stopcock in the street without having to go buy more water pipe.

So, before you pay any builders invoices, always demand to see receipts for ALL materials used and ask for at least 24hrs to go over everything before paying a penny, then ask them nicely what they have done with any leftover materials.