Building control
Last year I knocked down my old kitchen and built a new one.
Having a brother as a surveyor and a mate who's a builder, it seemed a match made in heaven. Nearly everything went according to plan, the only problem was building control.
Now, my builder mate is Bulgarian. Lovely guy, comes from a nice place and is very smart and professional.
Building control took one look at him and decided that, as he was Eastern European, they would give him a nightmare about everything he did.
First, they made him dig the foundations deeper by a couple of inches each time they came round (three times). Then they wouldn't let him fill them in until more investigation had been done on the drains. Would they just refer to whatever plans they have? Would they fuck. They got builder matie to dig the whole area out for them so they could see.
It took six weeks in the end before they would let us fill in the foundations.
Then we had the same thing with the inner floor foundation, three weeks before that was sorted out.
Before anyone starts thinking that maybe my builder didn't know what he was doing, everything had already been done to building specifications (most of my family are in the trade in one way or another, so this was all triple checked).
I won't bother listing everything out, but everytime we put something up they made us change it.
Instead of two months, the build took six to complete. We spent half a year in a building site because building control don't like Eastern european builders.
Why do I say that's the reason? Because a neighbour of mine did the same extension at the same time. He used a couple of polish teenagers, but never let building control meet them.
He didn't build his extension to standard (various things like he didn't build his external walls to have an inner and an outter wall for insulaton, used internal breeze-blocks for outside walls, used the wrong render mix outside so it's now falling off etc). He never got one word of complaint from building control and was able to finish his build before mine, even though he started afterwards.
Even looking at the figures would have shown them that his build was crap. He spent £6000 to build an extension larger than mine, mine cost £20,000 for materials alone - so how does that figure?

The tossers still won't sign off my build as they want me to replace a sky-light window as they say it will leak.
The amount of rainfall we've had recently and the window hasn't leaked once. But they still won't sign it off.

B'stards
(EvilMeister, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 13:55, Reply)