‘Our life’s been left in tatters’
A COUPLE were left facing a £63,000 bill after a rogue builder put up wonky walls and uneven floors.
Mark Smith, 56, and his wife Gillian hired an architect and a builder to work on a kitchen extension and garden room at their three-bedroom house.
But the ‘cold, callous and heartless’ builder left them living in a building site in Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire.
They were forced to pull the internal walls down and replace the door frames.
There are still gaping holes in the walls and floors, ‘bangs in the night’ as bricks crumble and the roof has been installed at the wrong angle.
The builder became aggressive and refused to admit fault when they asked him to fix the work in March 2020.
When he finally did so nearly a year later, he ‘made it worse’ and boarded up the walls to hide it. The builder left with £33,000 of the couple’s money and they estimate it will cost a further £30,000 to rectify the errors.
But the Smiths (right) have been told it will cost between £20,000 and £30,000 to pursue the case through the civil courts and, even then, the company can be wound up to avoid any resulting court order.
Mark, a sales manager, has been left trying to complete the work himself at the weekend. The father of one says: ‘We have suffered two years of heartache, sleepless nights and tears over this ordeal. My wife and I get up feeling depressed.
‘Until you’ve gone through this situation, you don’t understand — it is total anguish. He’s nothing but a rogue and he’s left our life in tatters.’
He called for a law to give recourse to victims, adding: ‘You feel so helpless.’