Do British Tradesmen still have pride in their work?

[FrenchieBoy]

OK, First of all I do not claim to be any sort of a tradesman, never have and never will but I always used to believe that British Tradesmen had pride in their work. However my opinion on that is now rapidly changing!
We've just had our bathroom converted into a full wet room, which was finished a week ago.
We started getting problems even before the job was finished!
The second fix electrician came and that very same night we lost all of the electrics in the bathroom. They came and rectified the problem the following day but did not tell me what the problem had been!
The second fix plumbers came and they had to be called back because the toilet bowl had not been fixed in square to the cistern, and then the cistern flushing unit locked up and refused to flush the same night!
A couple of days after the job was finished I noticed that the floor was starting to lift around the shower drain hole. On top of that the wife noticed that there were a couple of floor tiles starting to lift in the kitchen (The kitchen is separated from the bathroom via one thin wall, I'm not sure what it is made of but could be just breeze blocks) and that the carpet near the living room/ kitchen door was starting to show a constant very wet patch.
We called the Site manager yesterday and he came and had a look. He decided that the wet room floor needed to be taken up and a new one refitted. However he could not work out how or why the kitchen floor tiles were starting to lift and the carpet was starting to get wet - Something that has only started to happen since the wet room was fitted!
I have to admit that I could not work it out either until this evening when I decided to opened the inspection hatch behind the shower to see if anything was leaking in there. What I found really shocked me! There is a mains water supply pipe that runs to the shower that has not been fitted straight into one of the copper 15mm elbow and also that the soldering was so badly done that it was leaking and the water running along the floor and somehow under the kitchen floor tiles and into the living room carpet!
Just to add "insult to injury" the mess that is in there behind the inspection hatch is nothing short of disgraceful! - They appear to have stuffed screwed up balls of the polythene that the sink and fittings etc had arrived in into the area behind the inspection hatch, they had used the inspection hatch to throw empty coke cans in, there is a load of lumps of concrete from the old floor that they had to take up to fit the shower thrown in there as well as loads of old pieces of wood from the old bath fittings - some of the lumps of concrete are tangled around a load of tangled electric cables with bare ends (Thankfully the cables are just earth wires).
I will be phoning their head office with a complain and offering them a copy of the photos of the entire mess and will have to see what they say.
As for me if this is "typical british workmanship" then it is no wonder this country is going to rack and ruin!
Have any of you guys had modernisation work done that you feel was not up to standard?
p.s. I will not name the company concerned or show any of the photos of the complete mess until I have spoken to them tomorrow!

 

[The Singing Stalker]

Welcome to the real world. I worked on new builds in the late 80’s and the workmanship was terrible. Apprenticeships were 4 years on and off the job, now you do a 6 month course and your a fully qualified xyz. trades men think it is on to walk into your house and plug their drill batteries in to charge without asking. Then spend half their time on the phone chatting to new potential customers.
Where I can I will use locally recommended people or small companies. I am lucky in that where I live I can find good builders and not the sort of 'oh he was ever so nice and tidy I really recommend him' but the type who know what a good builder should be capable of. I have generally been lucky. The biggest problem is the lack of people out there, the good ones are always busy so you may have to wait a flipping age.
At some point I will be getting an extension in with a wet room and that does worry me, but to be fair, I will be looking over their shoulders and checking the work every night, I’m lucky in that I have a reasonable understanding of how most things work.
I think it is a sign of the times and the more people involved in a job the more chance you will have a prat.

And the short answer is, yes there are still some good workers out there, but there is more dross so you have to find the good one and wait for him to show up.
lot to be said for paying with a credit card to offer some protection.

 

[eldon]

i know your pain and can fully empathise....My mum decided on a wet room against my advice ( a three bedroom house with no bath???).
The job was shocking!
Radiator valves sat on pipes that came out of the floor at 45° angles and so smacked your ankles as you came through the door.
New tiles broken and dismissed.
Toilet cistern 2" off the wall with a block of wood behind.
Lead pipe sections left in soil pipe as that was outside this jobs remit etc. despite changing the bowl and some of the connecting pipework.

Young apprentices working for low wages and slapping it together.

A complaint meeting followed and an older skilled gent was sent.
Apparently he was p155ed off as this was his normal mode de operandi chasing these young clowns about!!!!!

 

[sikadog]

We are told that checkatrade.com is the way to go, recently I have followed 3 travelers vans with checkatrade.com logos on the, so that's another waste of time..

 

[alberta boy]

A different angle on this . I work in the Oil Field Construction industry ( what's left of it anyway ) and until recently , we had more jobs than people to fill them , so we had a very high number of foreign workers . There are a lot of tradesmen here from the UK , all the guys I worked with were very capable and well trained individuals . The majority ended up staying here permanently as most companies gave them some fairly hefty incentives ( money and senior positions ) if they stayed . UK trades have a very good reputation in the Alberta Oil Patch .

AB

 

[The Singing Stalker]

A boiler engineer friend of mine paid out his fee to, whatever the company is who, ah, Corgi? Just remembered. They were supposed to inspect his work at least twice a year to ensure the standard, suffice to say over 10 years they never did.
complete waste of time. Unfortunately it just brings standards down. Yes you can register and no one will check.

 

[FrenchieBoy]

Welcome to the real world. I worked on new builds in the late 80’s and the workmanship was terrible. Apprenticeships were 4 years on and off the job, now you do a 6 month course and your a fully qualified xyz. trades men think it is on to walk into your house and plug their drill batteries in to charge without asking. Then spend half their time on the phone chatting to new potential customers.
Where I can I will use locally recommended people or small companies. I am lucky in that where I live I can find good builders and not the sort of 'oh he was ever so nice and tidy I really recommend him' but the type who know what a good builder should be capable of. I have generally been lucky. The biggest problem is the lack of people out there, the good ones are always busy so you may have to wait a flipping age.
At some point I will be getting an extension in with a wet room and that does worry me, but to be fair, I will be looking over their shoulders and checking the work every night, I’m lucky in that I have a reasonable understanding of how most things work.
I think it is a sign of the times and the more people involved in a job the more chance you will have a prat.

And the short answer is, yes there are still some good workers out there, but there is more dross so you have to find the good one and wait for him to show up.
lot to be said for paying with a credit card to offer some protection.

I understand what you are saying and YES I do believe that there are still some good tradesmen out there who do take real pride in their work and offer good value for your money. As it is with us we had no say in what company was "contracted" to do the work as it was arranged through the District Nurse and the Occupational Therapist who had both condemned our bath (It was only 15 inches deep so you were better sitting in a puddle in the rain). However even though it still cost Rochdale Borough Council nearly five and a half thousand pounds and I'm sure that they would still expect a "reasonable quality of work" for their money.
Unfortunately situations like this can put you in a position where you sometimes feel like (Unfairly) tarring them all with the same brush! Let's see what the company say tomorrow morning - If I don't get the right answers I will not hesitate in naming and shaming them!!

 

[Sonicdmb73]

Yes there’s still those with pride in their work.
However I could probably write a book or two with some of the things I have seen in my thirty plus years (not counting growing up with a builder for a father).
I know quite a few small businesses that put quality first.
But it has always been the case where cowboys and wannabes slip through. Regulation is shifting many of them of site but they have a nasty habit of turning up in the domestic market.
Unfortunately there’s usually a shortage of skilled men and schools pushing academic career paths as opposed to practical trades don’t help either.

 

[enfieldspares]

We are told that checkatrade.com is the way to go, recently I have followed 3 travelers vans with checkatrade.com logos on the, so that's another waste of time..

Some of these bodies actually are just an organ that sells membership...and a badge...to anyone who'll pay the fee. One such, certainly that is how it was with it in the 1980s, was "The Guild of Master Craftsmen".

 

[biffo]

DIY ....

 

[John Gryphon]

I worked with a bloke,a carpenter over the course of quite a few years and he was a chippy guru. Liked the grog a bit much and used to roll up the other tobacco a fair bit too but I have never seen a bloke hand cut 45 degree mitre`s in 14" skirting boards (kauri pine) with a hand saw like he did. No aids,just eye to hand. The 45`s were flawless and married together like no others. Yes in 14".
The skirts were especially run in Fiji of all places for the restoration works of a Gothic revival manor house.

I worked with other carpenters also and their skills were with drop saws and nail guns and that was about it. Modern plumbers in Aus glue plastic pipe together it seems...

 

[Gunner223]

Ive just moved into a new house,( new to me) built in the 80s and kin hell what some bodges ive found, the biggest was a waste pipe from the toilet (4") was just balanced on top of another pipe of the same diameter and yep kin taped together, yep leaking sewage in the rafters , in the end ive replaced 2 bathrooms , a shower room , cloakroom , completely re floored upstairs and re plumed upstairs, replaced the staircase, and now starting on the kitchen just because of fu....g bodgers,
Im lucky i can do it myself so saved a lot of money.never again

 

[McKenzie]

We had 2 bathrooms stripped out & replaced last year & on the recommendation of our builder neighbour we used a Polish heating engineer. He did all of it by himself to an extraordinarily high standard; couldn't be happier after some of my recent experiences with lazy tradesmen.

 

[Stalker62]

I find it depressing that the general concuss is that British folk cannot complete anything to a decent enough standard.
If this were the

 

[themolecatcher]

I have refurbished 6 houses over the last 10 years. It has taken this time to sort the wheat from the chaff. The lads I use are tried and tested. Good job and a reasonable price. I have told several where to go and they get upset when you point out the poor quality of their workmanship !!! Maybe my management skills are rusty

 

[paul o']

Long time ago we had tradesman , now we have Tech's or replacment agents as most are unable to dive down to component level to fix something ! its order and replace the whole part now days , even if its just a 1amp fuse on a mother board or burnt shunt ,the fluke tester ,9083/0ther are just tea cup stands . I once had a Tech doing the spit test on Coms wire to see if it was live as he did't know how to use his butt phone and he was out of the training school from Kelly Com's .
On most large building sites when i was installing data coms all you could hear was Polish from floor Screeders to painters just chatter like fax's but there work was spot on clean and tidy .

 

[kennyc]

A boiler engineer friend of mine paid out his fee to, whatever the company is who, ah, Corgi? Just remembered. They were supposed to inspect his work at least twice a year to ensure the standard, suffice to say over 10 years they never did.
complete waste of time. Unfortunately it just brings standards down. Yes you can register and no one will check.

It's been gas safe for years, corgi are just a trading company.
Gas safe now just keep a list of who has qualified for what, qualification is not a guarantee of competence, it just means you passed a test on paper. Site visits are minimal as everyone is expected to re -qualify every 5 years in each of the areas they work in,so no need for the old system of annual visits (it was never twice a year as far as I remember, and usually it was one visit per company not per employee)
There are plenty of good tradesmen about, however there are also plenty of the other sort around, good luck sorting the wheat from the chaff!

 

[VSS]

Sorry to hear about that FrenchieBoy.
We also had a full bathroom job done recently, cost a fortune, but I can honestly say that the quality of the workmanship and the level of customer service was faultless from start to finish, and yes, the team very definitely took pride in the job.

 

[Lickashot]

From experience, if you want it done properly, do most of it yourself. I only use tradesmen now for specific jobs, such as plastering, gas connections, wiring in the oven etc... Caught too many out lieing and bodging to leave them loose in my house again. In the end I had to finish building the extension and renovate the house myself. Fitted kitchen, moved and fitted new radiators, added plugs and circuit for extractor fan off the main circuit, lights, brickwork, painting, skirtings, coving, wallpapering, carpets, put roof and floor on the extension, tiled through, taped and jointed...I could go on. I have not found it that hard to do most of it to a reasonably high standard, just very time consuming. Just got to finish planing and painting the doors and fit the handles and a couple of carpets and all done...

To be honest, I cannot imagine how much it would have cost to get it all done by tradesmen. I don't think many of those now 40 and under can afford to use them much and as such those inclined to take on projects are simply learning to do it themselves just to make the whole thing financially viable. All I hear is how busy tradesmen are and I often I wonder if that will last...

 

[User00035]

This British trademan still takes pride in his work. Wouldn't be any point getting out of bed to do it otherwise.