Builder’s collapse takes toll on family
BIANCA Purcell says the stress of husband Steve losing work – after a builder he was working for went bust – put immense strain on their family and their relationship.
The Nerang-based carpenter was just 25, out on his own and responsible for a gang of seven men.
Steve was the boss, the one who paid the wages and, in an industry where risk presents everywhere, the one who ultimately carried the can.
He worked on condition of invoices presented at 15 days and payment at 30. It was an approach that helped him sleep at night.
Then in early 2017 he woke to a text message telling him the gates were locked and not to go to the site at Waverley St Annerley, a CMS-Ashtay project he had been working on.
Within the month another job at Morningside for CKP Constructions had gone belly up.
On that one he had changed his terms to 30-day invoices on offer of a payment boost.
It was a warning sign he missed.
Only later did he realise his team and other trades on the site were replacements for others who previously, he said, had been ruthlessly swept out of the job.
When it came time for money to hit his bank account, it was missing.
“They said they may have missed my invoice or that it could have come in late,” Steve recalls.
“I said I would not come back, the money went in and we worked another two weeks before they went under.”
Caught for $35,000 within a month, Steve, who operates Stephen P Carpentry in Brisbane, said any more would have finished his fledgling business.
While Steve struggled at work, he came home to a pregnant wife who was about three months off giving birth to their second daughter, the pressure building on the both of them.
Bianca Purcell, 25, said it affected them not only as a family but put strain on them as a couple.
“It was just heartbreaking,” she said.
“It was such a big lump sum in one go, it put strain on us as a couple, not just as a family.”
Steve said he has no time for the industry regulator, the QBCC, whose licensing of builders he said offered no security of their financial viability.
And he described attending a meeting of creditors of the two companies that burnt him, as just more wasted time.
“The worst thing is builders want all your information,” he said.
“We should be able to know they have good credit, are paying their quarterly BAS and are doing the right thing.
“I don’t know where the money goes (when builders go broke). They all pay the same rate.”
WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO KNOW THEY HAVE GOOD CREDIT ... AND ARE DOING THE RIGHT THING.
– STEVE PURCELL