Man left using bathroom in darkness for months says it's like 'living in third world country'
A man has described his living situation as an "absolute nightmare" after being left without a bathroom ceiling and light for five months.
Dad Simon Hart, of Martins Close, Barrow upon Humber, first alerted Ongo Homes at the start of the year when he discovered Artex on his bathroom ceiling contained asbestos. Removal teams arrived in April, taking down the entire ceiling.
He said: "The Artex in the ceiling had a small amount of asbestos in it. With it being in the bathroom, condensation builds up in there and it had started to peel off, so I rang Ongo Homes to have it removed. They got someone in to remove it and took the whole ceiling away, and said that plasterers were going to come back the next day and put a new ceiling in, but it never happened."
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Simon added: "I rang them again to ask when it would be replaced, because I have a 15-year-old daughter who comes to stay quite often, and just for safety reasons I wanted it sorting out for her. They got back to me and said it wouldn't be until September 17 that it would be replaced, so I had to wait all that time without a bathroom ceiling."
"It upset me for my daughter, because it wasn't a very pleasant thing to shower underneath. You could hear the birds in the attic rustling about. I had to make a makeshift ceiling myself because there was all sorts of stuff falling through, it was just getting beyond a joke and it was getting me down.", reports Grimsby Live.
Simon has been resorting to using a camping stove light in his bathroom for illumination over the past few months, and although the ceiling was sorted this week, he is still without a proper light.
"If you want to go to the toilet in the evening, it's an absolute nightmare. We have to use a little camping stove light," he shared.
"At the beginning I thought, 'I can get on with it', but after a while you think, 'I'm paying full rent for this and nothing is happening, we're having to use the bathroom in the dark'. It feels like we're in a third-world country."
On Tuesday, September 17, contractors visited Simon's property to install new boards in his bathroom ceiling and plastered over them - yet he remains without a light.
"They said they've booked it in, but they don't know when they're going to come," he revealed.
"I thought they would've given me a bit of a leeway, to compensate for the state I'm living in. How many homes are they going to keep leaving like this? There's families living in Ongo properties who have three or four kids."
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Liam Trevor, the Maintenance Area Manager at Ongo, remarked: "We received reports on 16 January 2024 from the tenant of flaking plaster in the bathroom of their home."
"We attended the next day to inspect. From here we booked in a contractor to remove asbestos from the ceiling, so that we could go in and safely plaster. This was completed on 2 April."
"We then attended this week (17 September) to plaster and have made attempts to book in the final stage of installing a new bathroom light. We hope to carry this out by the end of this week."
"We appreciate that the length of time taken is both frustrating and unacceptable. It is not one that delivers the level of service we aim to provide and for this we apologise. We will continue to work with the tenant."