Plymouth man quoted £15k for building job that cost just £185
A man from Devon says rogue traders quoted him as much as £15,000 for a job that ended up costing a tiny fraction of that price. He has now advised others how to avoid being ripped off.
Max Channon says he was trying to sell his small house in Plymouth last summer and had a buyer lined up. Things got complicated when their surveyor found a problem with the roof.
One of the four purlins - structural beams that run the length of the roof - had split and three of the roof rafters were beginning to sag. Max says the prospective buyers also brought in a structural engineer who told him that the purlin had failed but said it could be replaced cheaply.
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He says he ran into further problems when they demanded a significant sum be knocked off the price of the house because of the problems with the roof.
Writing for the Express, Max said: "After ghosting the estate agent and my solicitor for several weeks, the prospective buyers demanded that the cost of a full roof replacement be knocked off the sale price. I politely told them to go forth and multiply - and the sale fell through."
To make matters worse, he was diagnosed with cancer at the beginning of October 2023. While he says the cancer was one that responds well to treatment, he describes the treatment he needed as "brutal" and said that he decided not to move.
He said: "It turns out that having one’s neck and face blasted with radiation every day for six weeks comes with some pretty nasty side effects.
"All of that is another story - suffice to say, I eventually decided not to move. I left getting the roof sorted until after my cancer treatment (which I’m pleased to report was successful) had finished - and I had started on the long and winding road to recovery from the radiotherapy."
As he started to feel better, he says he decided to turn his attention back to the roof problem. After advertising the job on two 'find a builder' websites, he says he was inundated with phone calls, texts and emails from builders.
He arranged for some of the highest-rated builders to come around and offer a quote but says he was quoted some staggering sums. Max says one said they could replace the purlin for about £2,000, some tried to convince him the entire roof needed replacing, while others quoted as much as £15,000, not including VAT.
"Fortunately, the radiation treatment hadn’t completely scrambled my brain," Max says. Instead, he decided to hire his own structural engineer to assess the roof for £420 and says it was "money well spent".
Max says the new engineer told him that when the house was first built, the builders had used one purlin that was an inch thinner than the others, which eventually caused the purlin to fail. But he says the rest of the roof was structurally sound.
He hired a builder 'Kev the builder', recommended by another tradesman who Max says installed the new purlin "in little more than a morning".
He said: "His bill, for materials and labour, was £185. I paid him £250, thanked him profusely - and was relieved to have my roof finally sorted.
"So, what has all this taught me? Well, if in doubt - get a structural engineer’s report done. It may cost a few hundred quid, but it could save you thousands.
"And, what about hiring a tradesman? If possible, get a few who are recommended by people you trust - and several quotes. "