Ex-soap star’s roofing job left my home uninhabitable
AFORMER soap star charged a Runcorn dad-of-two thousands of pounds for a dodgy roofing job that left his house ‘uninhabitable’.
The roof of Peter Hallwood’s home was blown off in Storm Doris in February 2017 – and he called on Kirk Smith to carry out the repair work.
Mr Smith, who played Keith Rooney in Brookside and Emmerdale trucker Pete Collins, was running a company called 5KC Ltd.
The former actor quoted Peter £22,000 to fit a new roof – but when Peter, 39, said he was not covered by his insurance and could not afford it, he slashed the price by thousands.
Peter paid him £5,000 to fit a new roof, but when the leaks started pouring in, he realised that the roofer had only done a patch-up job.
He claims that the house was left ‘uninhabitable’ and that he had to call another company out in July 2018 to fix the roof properly.
After months of chasing Mr Smith for answers and asking for his money back, Peter took his case to small claims court in March this year.
Mr Smith was ordered to pay Peter nearly £9,000 for the dodgy roofing job, plus £900 in costs.
Energy sales worker Peter said: “Back in February when it was Storm Doris, my roof blew off.
“My house is at the end of the row on Handforth Lane in Runcorn.
“It has a flat roof and about 10 roofs came off.
“I’ve known Kirk as a family friend and he has done work for me before so we trusted him.
“He said I was going to need an entire new roof with a quote for £22,000.
“I went to the insurance and realised I wasn’t insured properly for a flat roof, so I said ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do it Kirk.’
“He said he wouldn’t
● use scaffolding, which he had quoted me for, or the internal work.
He said he would cut back and because I was a friend he would do it for £5,000.
“I had looked at other roofing companies who quoted about £6,500 for a full roof.”
But, despite feeling that Mr Smith had done him a favour with his cut price quote, Peter soon started realising it had not solved the problem.
He said: “[Mr Smith] repaired it and then the leaks started coming through.
“He said he would send some sub-contractors out to patch it up. They were lovely lads and they said [Mr Smith] told them to patch over it.
“[Mr Smith] said he had re-felted the whole roof.
“He said he was going to give me a full roof and then when I was asking him to come back and have a look at it, he would never come back.”
On two occasions, Mr Smith sent sub-contractors out to patch up the problems – but frustrated Peter had enough and called out another company to do a full survey.
The results revealed that the roof had just been felted over, rather than being totally replaced ase Mr Smith had promised Peter.
Peter said: “I went to small claims court in March and he was ordered to pay me £8,509.92 and costs of £910.
“It was gutting because the house was wrecked from top to bottom, there was the stress of not knowing when it was getting fixed and I didn’t have the money to get it fixed again.
He added: “He has cost me a lot of money and stress.”
“The property was completely uninhabitable due to us not being able to complete the works.”
Kirk Smith, who now runs another business, Renov8 Construction Services, was contacted for comment but did not respond by the time of publication.