Carrying scars of encounters with cowboy builders

YOU can be mourning your partner and get no better than a “things could be worse” reaction from friends and family.

You can be fresh from burying your dog and receive nothing more than “well there’ll be less hair to hoover up” from your nearest and dearest.

But utter the phrase, “we’ve got the builders in” and strangers and enemies will offer their deepest sympathies.

We’ve all been led up the garden path to find the new wall at the end looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Been flushed with anger at the leaky new bathroom. Been roasted over the bill for the wonky new kitchen.

They come in and take out your windows and leave you open to the elements and your bank balance exposed to a chill wind as they skip town with the deposit you’ve given them for the replacement fenestration, never to be seen again.

I was scarred for life at an early age – when I was nine I tripped over a badly laid step leading up to our house and cracked my shin.

The wobbly concrete had been put in place by a bloke who arrived in a blaze of promises and left us in a chaos of rubble as he trousered his inflated pay and rode off into the sunset to the land cowboy builders call home.

My dad had brought him in to put right some of the damage done by another firm of builders who had taken our home improvement grant, a council-subsidised payment aimed at ensuring ageing houses didn’t deteriorate into slums, and turned our perfectly livable semi into somewhere a pig would turn its nose up at.

They put one window in upside down. The concrete screed they laid for a new floor was so short of cement that the result was more like a sandpit at a kindergarten. Another floor they put down was so uneven it would have made particularly testing hole on a seaside park’s crazy golf circuit.

Then they went bust, with the deposit payment squirrelled away somewhere safe from the receivers.

The council wouldn’t approve the work and release the grant because it wasn’t finished. My parents couldn’t afford to get anybody else in to complete the job until we had pursued the dodgy builders through the courts.

Our house was a building site for a year until my mum and dad scraped together enough money to get the work finished by another firm. The first priority was to get the steps up from the street fixed so the new company could get access – which is why my dad got the handyman in on the Sunday, so the proper firm could get started on the Monday.

And so it came to pass that, 50 years later, nervous as a cat on a greasy high wire with eight lives gone, I contacted all the builders that neighbours had ever used and praised and found all were too busy to take on our job.

I took a punt on a stranger who gave us a quote and who seemed like a nice enough chap.

And so he proved. He turned up on time. He did the work as quickly as he promised and exactly to budget. He even toiled over the weekend to finish the job after a co-worker let him down. Before he left he insisted on borrowing a mop and bucket to leave the place pristine.

I asked if he’d give us a quote for some other work. He said he couldn’t because he was moving to London.

No problem, I told him. We’ll move there too.