I’ll not forget this one

[Doug]

Thought I’d share this, a couple of years ago an old customer of mine decided to downsize to a bungalow over the last two years I’ve been slowly putting right some of the worse work I’ve ever seen all of which her surveyor failed to mention
Some of this included a bath the waste pipe of which had never been connected so when it was emptied it ran straight into the void under the floorboards, an extractor fan that didn’t go through the wall to outside,weeping pipework that lead to mushrooms growing under the integrated washing machine, the list really was endless with workmanship of such poor quality it was unbelievable.

The final job has been to sort out the shower room, now most of this work has been done in the last 10 years, the shower, wall & floor tiling doesn’t look too bad & as she had already had to spend far more than she hoped it was decided to just deal with the built in “furniture” which at first glance with its gloss doors didn’t look too horrendous until you looked inside, this is typical of the standard of work I’ve been uncovering.
This is it with the doors removed



Originally this room had been the kitchen, the window was where the back door was with the boiler to the right & the fuse box to the left.



The first clue was the fact the doors had been hung with 20mm hinges but the holes were 35mm
:


As nothing had been thought out the hinges had needed spacing.




The sides of the “furniture” appear to have been made from old wardrobes the broken chipboard being where the original hinges would have been & yes that’s a double edge of raw plaster board which showed when the door was shut.



Clearly they hadn’t wasted too much money on tile adhesive.



The lights in the room were controlled by two way switches though this didn’t become apparent until the wardrobe sides were removed



Clearly they didn’t struggle getting their housing joints to go together



But my favourite was the bracket fixings that held the raw chipboard shelves in place :lol:



To be fair they held quite well :lol:

 

[Cabinetman]

That’s pretty bad Doug, just what sort of lowlife would do that with a bath waste, it’s criminal.

 

[AJB Temple]

It's disgraceful sometimes the lack fo quality workmanship. It looks very DIY / clueless.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

No, it looks like the work of a con man.

 

[Mike G]

Bloody hell. That really is apalling.

I'd really want to know who did something like that, and why.

 

[Lons]

Sadly not uncommon Doug, I came across many such examples which I firmly believe was DIY botchup however there was one similar to yours where a professional plumber had connected a shower waste but not tightened the nut, several years later the smell alerted the owner and I was called in where I discovered the leak had rotted support joists and the whole lot had to come out. It was an insurance claim but sadly no action could be taken against the plumber who had died and his business folded.

At least a lot of that is cosmetic, you should have seen some of the structures built without founds or lintels which were downright dangerous.

 

[RogerS]

Fried of mine had a first floor flat in London and had her kitchen redone by a team of cowboys. Their solution to the kitchen sink waste was to simply drill a large hole through the external wall and poke the waste pipe out through that.

And in a house we renovated for sale, the C/H overflow was routed into the hot water tank rather than the expansion tank.

 

[Mike G]

......... a professional plumber had connected a shower waste but not tightened the nut.....

To be fair, that could just have been an accidental oversight. There was nothing accidental about the nightmare Doug uncovered.

 

[thetyreman]

cringeworthy work, a bit sickening as well that somebody had the arrogance to charge money for this.

 

[Doug]

From what the neighbours have told the present owner the previous owner would have anyone do work as long as it was cheap & he wasn’t prompt with payment so I’m guessing there was no continuity of work by one or 2 tradesmen, not that that excuses poor work but a string of different folks doing jobs as cheap as possible & not getting paid promptly is never going to go well.

This was the scene with most of it all ripped out.




The area around the window was to be tiled so this needed making good, this was insulated, boarded & plastered



As standard bathroom furniture wouldn’t be big enough to house the boiler it was decided to use kitchen carcasses which were all cut down in both depth & widths to best fit round all the services that had to remain, the cut down cupboards were reassemble with confirmat screws.




This made the doors non-standard sizes which meant a trip to @bungles workshop to get the doors & panelling cnc’d & edgebanded.



The boiler was recently new but even this gas fitter couldn’t get his boiler level it does make you wonder :?



A few photos of the interiors






Finally the toilet needed moving over as originally it sat on the tile to the left of its new position so the cupboard door hit the toilet meaning it only opened a few inches, as there weren’t any spare tiles it was more of the same boarding to make boxing



This really has been a bit of a head scratcher particularly as the budget wasn’t limitless but the lady is very happy which is the main thing.

 

[RogerS]

Quality work as ever, Doug. :eusa-clap:

 

[Cabinetman]

Huge improvement Doug, three different rooms in three different hotels – the same chain though, the toilet door always missed the front of the toilet by about 3 mm, I really don’t know why they designed it that way when there was plenty room to move the door, and also how they managed such consistency lol.

 

[Lons]

......... a professional plumber had connected a shower waste but not tightened the nut.....

To be fair, that could just have been an accidental oversight. There was nothing accidental about the nightmare Doug uncovered.

That's very true Mike but a pro worth his salt would have tested it before sealing everything up. the shower was purpose built in with no access to the waste trap. Not clever.

 

[Trevanion]

I don't think the advent of YouTube and the like has helped with "cowboy builders", there seems to be more now than ever that think they can do a job which is way above their skill level. I'm all for someone doing DIY in their own home, even if it's a bit rubbish, but when someone has such a low standard of work and they are charging for it, it's appalling.

There's someone local to me that's fairly recently set up their own handyman business after jacking in their NHS job during the Covid Crisis, but the quality of work is absolutely shocking and the prices aren't far off what a decent tradesman would charge for the work. I saw a fence that he'd done and none of the posts were sound, they were all at funny angles, and the tops had been cut back with a chainsaw but no end sealer had been applied to the freshly exposed end of a tanalised post, it wasn't going to last particularly long and they'd paid a fair sum for it. Then I saw another job where I was called in to take a look at it for an opinion, he'd build a stud wall in half of a barn for turning half of it into a stable, and cladded the outside with feather-edge boards plus a stable door too, not a single piece of timber was level in any dimension, it hadn't been properly fixed to the walls, the door had a tendency to swing open because nothing was level, and the feather edge was upside-down with the fat end up. That wasn't so much the issue, but the partition between the stable half of the barn and the storage half he'd just run 4x2 from the top of an existing 4ft block wall to the roof, one every 8ft or so along the wall, and stapled some membrane to it. Of course, a bit of wind picked up and it just ripped the membrane straight off didn't it and the horse wouldn't go in because of the flapping noise. I secured it back by screwing some plastic trims that the owner had knocking around to the timbers FOC because I felt bad for them, they had also spent quite a lot on the masterful example of cowboy/clueless building.

Fortunately, I rarely have to deal with other people's mess though I do enjoy seeing what other people deem "acceptable".

 

[Doug]

Thanks for the comments chaps, sadly I see poor workmanship on a regular basis this one made me glad not to be an electrician,



Not only would you have to dismantle part of the new garage door to get into the fuse box but just flicking the main switch off meant a 10 minute job to switch it back on as in the off position it wedged behind the door runner.

Folks not knowing copper pipe & cement isn’t a good combination



Mushrooms growing under a washing machine as the chipboard floor was sodden from the faulty plumbing



Home owners not realising air bricks are there for a reason & shouldn’t be siliconed up









Fortunately the floor came up very easily literally by the hand full, it took longer to replace it all :eusa-doh:

I had dozens of examples on my old phone but when I come across such work it’s nice as I’m reminded of my dear old dad who I worked for for many years, on seeing work like this his comment with a wry smile on his face would be “don’t knock it son these blokes are making good work for you & plenty of it” he certainly wasn’t wrong :eusa-shifty:

 

[chataigner]

My favourite was a friend who had bought a large 19th C house with a few horrors, the best (worst ?) of which was a large bedroom floor which sagged a bit and was rather bouncy in parts - turned out to be due to a chimney having been removed and the joists that ran at right angles to the chimney no longer reached the wall. They were simply left cantilevered :lol: :lol: and supported by the floorboards

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I took a stud wall out. In theory it wasn't load bearing, but I stuck some acrows up anyway. Just as well, the middle four joists didn't even reach the wall they were so badly rotted.

 

[AJB Temple]

These kind of photos Doug are what would put me off doing work for other people.

But even "high end" can employ bodgers. A friend of mine in London has been having her kitchen replaced. Circa £100k from a high street operation. Quite cheap for them but the kitchen is not large. They have fitted C16 battens to the wall to butt kitchen cupboards against. The "fitter" has nailed these to the walls with 4" nails just banged straight into the brick.

Their electrician has just surface tacked all the new cabling to the plaster and the fused spurs for dishwasher etc are all positioned such that installed cabinets will make them totally hidden. She asked me about it and has now called a halt to the work, requiring remediation.

I think some trades think customers are stupid, and if it can't be seen it can be bodged.

 

[RogerM]

This was an interesting arrangement in The Sun Inn at Warkworth whilst hiking the St Oswald Way in 2017. I'd love to get inside the head of the guy who packed his tools away thinking "That's a job well done".

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