Home DIY

@nefarious Here's a few photos.

Boards have been cut short at pretty much every door architrave and the gap (about 15mm) filled with mastic. There's about 12 locations like this.

Boards are cut short where they meet walls. This happens in a few locations. It's most frustrating in areas where the skirting was actually removed, and then reinstated in a ham-fisted fashion. Today we actually found an offcut of the new floorboards wedged in behind the skirting. I had my plasterer remedy this already.

Boards are cut off-square at ends. I am at a loss to see how this is even possible. He had a chop saw or miter saw (not sure exactly which it was) on site for goodness sake. How can you even cut a board in a wavy manner when its sitting on a table and the machined edge of the board is against the cutting guide. Unless I have grossly misunderstood it looks like all the boards were actually cut freehand with a multitool. And maybe he had his eyes closed when he did it.

No attempt to cut boards to match the edge of the hearthstone. Or the tiled bathroom floor. Or the adjacent retained historic boards. He said of the edge of the hearthstone, which I explained would be exposed when the project is finished, "you can put some silicone in there". That will look shit though. Just like it looks shit everywhere else.

Some scotia/ beading installed against skirtings and timber paneling to cover gaps where the boards haven't been cut properly to suit. @Bobbo has already summarised the state of these pretty well. They just look shocking. I have already had the worst of these removed.

Several squeaky boards. Probably to be expected to be fair. But it's still annoying, as one of the services that restoration companies offer is to deal with exactly this. I'd expect better from a new install.

Boards have been chopped out for radiator pipes in a way that... I dunno, I'm running out of words, it just shows that no care or attention was being used.

To be fair, I can deal with a lot of these simply by replacing all of my skirting with new thicker skirting. It's a lot of skirting, but the existing stuff wasn't anything special. However it would have been reasonable for the guy to point this out and offer to remove it all. Then he might have made a better job of dressing the boards against the plaster walls, so I would be able to reinstate something that looks good. In places he's left gaps between skirting and board end even when he actually removed the skirting FFS.

On the other hand, the total time spent by the joiner and his labourer was 6 hours on Friday and 11 hours on Saturday. I was fully happy and ready for this job to run on and take 3 days. I can see now that it should have done. The work has simply been done too fast.

Cost was £2500 for about 30 square metres, supply and fit. That's £83 per square metre.

The cost of the boards would have been around £900 (assume 50 boards which I have based on counting the boards and figuring the area, from my local wood merchant who charge £15.22 per 4.5m board, and allowing 20% wastage). This means the labour was £1600. That's £47/hour each for the two workers. I may be way off base here but the work I see doesn't warrant that kind of hourly rate. I contrast this with my plasterer who just a day and a half of work at around £30/hour, and did it really well even though it's complicated, bitty job and I changed the scope on the fly as we discovered more and more knackered bits of wall (some of which caused by the joiner).

So in summary I know I should walk away but I'm also supremely hacked off with it. The floor is the most expensive part of the project, and I'm looking at spending money repairing it within a couple of days of it being done.

p.s. apologies once again for the drawn-out drama fest.

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