A Space to Think...

I'm not usually one to bear a grudge, and I count myself as being the type of person that when things go wrong I try my best to see things from other people's perspectives (although Corinne would argue, correctly, against that - I do try though!). But for the past few weeks I have been attempting to use the services of what I can only describe as being THE most incompetent bunch of people to have ever disgraced the term 'tradesmen'.

Who has managed to rile me up this much? The culprits are a company called StopRot who are based in my hometown of  Eastbourne. The background is simple, we are selling a flat and want to get some guaranteed damp work fixed because it has shown up as breaking down in the homebuyers report. Fair enough, so the guarantee that StopRot have supplied to the original owner of the flat should apply to the bits that they are responsible for, right? The  saga continues with the following cacophony of errors:

•  The original StopRot  surveyor comes round, after a £50 deposit is paid in case we are "wasting their time" - ha! the irony,  and claims there is no damp to worry about.
• I find out that his means of testing for damp were severely suspect when we get a second (and third!) independent inspection, which find that there is indeed damp.
• We arrange to see the StopRot surveyor again, knowing this time that the way he surveyed the wall was rubbish and that he was, unwittingly or in full knowledge, pulling a fast one.
• I take time off of work and the surveyor doesn't turn up - 1 hour wasted.
• I take time off of work again and the surveyor doesn't turn up - 2 1/2 hours wasted total.
• Between the idiot in the office (who shall remain nameless but you know who you are!) and the surveyor himself,  things degrade into a confused storm of blame as to who is letting us down. We quickly realise that this company is run on a mixture of luck (that they every turn up to do a job) and miracles (when they actually do what they promise they will).
  
• Finally the surveyor turns up. He tries to pull some of the same ol' tricks he did last time but this time I'm savvy and his reading comes up with yes there is in fact damp. Whew, at last!
• The surveyor then states that he is going to get the job sorted out for next week - great! He asks for the names of the paint that are to be used once the job is done so that they can redecorate the room. Fair enough, he tells me that he's going to get the guy in the office to let me know when the guys are coming to do the work (my heart sinks when I hear the guy in the office is going to be involved, but what can you do?!).
• Monday morning, the guys turn up to fix the damp without any warning. We get an irate phone call that asks us why we aren't there to let them in. The guy in the office should have told us but,true to form, didn't.
• There's confusion over re-decorating, the guys sorting the damp out don't know who's going to do it or where the paints are coming from; we get the same cluelessness from the guy in the office, big surprise there.
• Finally we come to today. After we were locked out of the flat last night because the guys working on the damp had left with the key (after stating that they would let us know before they went) we have now been able to track down what is going on (because the guy in the office had no idea) and we are off to get the key back at lunch because anybody could have had in last night for all we knew. The question of re-decorating has reared its ugly head again, this time in terms of the surveyor claiming that we were going to get the paint (a lie) and me claiming that the surveyor asked me to let them know the paints to get because they were going to sort it all out (the truth). We also now have finally got confirmation that we will be getting our deposit for the original surveyor work back, although I'll believe that when I see it. And we still haven't been told when the re-decorating will be done, and by who, so there's no clear end in sight after two months or so of messing around.
  

There's lots more to this episode that I could mention, and it's not over yet so I'll probably end up ranting here again (apologies to my readers in advance). But, I implore you, don't get StopRot to do ANY work for you if you live in the eastbourne area. We didn't originally hire this bunch of clowns and were simply left picking up the pieces after work had been carried out previously. If you have any option, then go somewhere else or suffer the same level of incompetance that we've had to deal with over the past month.

 You have been warned, I just wish we had.