Building Work

Yes, we are the main contractor and we can deal with all trades for your project. A multi-trade project is what suits our team best.

We avoid using external subcontractors every time we can, last year less than 3% of our work was given to external subcontractors and it’s going to be even less this year. There are some instances where you have to use external subcontractors, but this doesn’t happen often. An example where we would use an external subcontractor is for gas work since there has to be a Gas Safe registered engineer for this and we undertake way too little work related to gas to make sense having a gas engineer in-house.

It’s a very frustrating process to use external subcontractors and one reason why we are doing better than others is this one, we have an in-house team that we can organise ourselves and supervise all the work. When we use external subcontractors we have no real control when they’ll arrive (since they have their own schedule that might run behind) and they make us lose efficiency.

Yes, our quotes are free. But since quotes take a big part of our time, this means that in certain areas or certain projects we won’t be able to quote for. Also, our current projects always have priority over quotes, we might have to cancel certain appointments if we need more time to spend on current projects.

We book our projects for only 1-2 months ahead, this relatively short time means that we can always finish our projects on time without unexpected cost rises in materials.

This means that it’s ideal to get a quote as soon as possible. The time it takes to sort out all the details/product options + the time it takes until we can actually fit your project in our calendar means that the sooner you take a quote, the better.

We try to minimise as much as possible the time to completion. We should be able to give you an estimate for this if you ask us once we discuss the project. The thing that slows us the most is that some projects simply don’t allow for multiple people to work at once.

For example, an extension project or extensive internal alterations allow us to use most of our team members. This means that, despite the fact that it takes a lot of work to finish the project, the work is divided amongst multiple persons. For smaller projects, it’s hard to work with more than 2-3 people at once; this happens because you can’t divide the task effectively among the team members or sometimes there’s simply not enough space to work for all of them.

No, the prices are not negotiable. Every project is priced as competitive as we can, but also enough to cover our bills. When prices are negotiable it means that some people pay more and some less for the same service, which is not fair for our customers.

There are still ways to make a project more affordable, contact us if you want to discuss other options. This could include different materials or an alternative scope of work.

Usually, we send our quotes in around a week by email after we discuss your project requirements.

We will not contact you again trough email or phone since we don’t want to put pressure on anyone to accept our quotes, so please contact us if you haven’t received your quote in a week.

You’ll never get an hourly rate only for your project. Instead, we estimate how much your project would take in hours and then multiply this by our current hourly rate. No matter how long your project will take, the price for you will stay fixed.

This means that it’s not very relevant for you how much our hourly rate is, but the total price we quote. Let’s take an example where we might quote 50 hours @ £40/hour, which means a £2000 labour charge. Someone else might charge 100 hours @ £20/hour, which means again a £2000 labour charge. Do you prefer a £20 or £40 charge per hour in this case? With the £40/hour, you pay the same total price, but it takes half the time for the project to finish.

Every 6 months or so we increase our hourly rate by 5-10%. This doesn’t necessarily mean a 5-10% increase in the total price since newer tools allow us to finish a project quicker. But you should expect our prices to constantly increase.

We work in the following postcodes for most of our projects: AB10, AB11, AB12, AB13, AB14, AB15, AB16, AB21, AB22, AB23, AB24, AB25, AB31, AB32. AB39, AB41, AB51.

For some larger projects, we might be willing to travel further, while for smaller ones they need to be very close in order to be cost-effective.

People get upset when we don’t want to quote for some projects, but we have to draw a line somewhere. Basically we need to be relatively close to most of our suppliers and our projects to be clustered in a relatively small area in order to reach optimum efficiency. Further away projects (especially in rural areas) means that our suppliers are far away and it’s hard to combine projects in such a way that they are close to each other. Also, in rural areas there are close communities, so local tradespeople have much better chances to win the project.

Almost all our invoices are paid by bank transfers. It’s the best option for both parties: transactions are free of charge and there’s a clear money trail for money. The bank details will be on the invoice.

We no longer accept credit/debit card. Our transactions are usually large and just a few of them per week, it’s very different from other businesses that might have hundreds of transactions per day. For each card payment transaction, we’d have to pay 1-2% to card’s payment merchant. In the past, we were charging these fees to the customers for card payments, but the law no longer accepts adding fees to certain payment methods only.

Yes, the project has to be at least 20 hours worth of work, otherwise, it’s not cost-effective for us. For smaller projects, we would charge 20 hours of work, no matter if it takes less. The only exception for this is for some of the previous customers we had a good relationship with, for whom we’d do these small projects at no charge and when our calendar allows it in the hope they’d use us again in the future for a larger project.

The reasoning for this is very simple: for every 2 persons in our team, there’s a van with tools & common materials ready for them. If we send someone for a project, we would have to send a van with 2 persons; even if it takes a few hours to complete the job, the chances are that we won’t be able to do anything else that day since to this we’d have to add commute times as well. We would have to pay the team members for that day even if it’s not a full day of work.

No matter if it’s a 10 hours project or 100 hours, the clerical work is pretty much the same: pay a visit to offer a quote, send a breakdown of the quote, discuss any details of the project, arrange a time/date, send a full VAT invoice and so on. Sometimes this part takes more than the actual work and the people doing this must be paid as well. This also explains why we’d rather do the project for free for some of our previous customers, it’s more cost-effective to us this way since we avoid all the clerical work.

So our costs are the same, no matter if it’s a 4 hours project or 20 hours one. There are a lot of handymen out there that struggle to fill their calendar and are more than happy to take small jobs, they actually advertise that ‘No job is too small’. For us filling the calendar was almost never an issue, so we can be picky in this aspect.

We try to be as good as Amazon when it comes to warranty. You’ll get a long warranty on workmanship and the products we supply. If there’s a problem related to the workmanship or materials, we’ll fix it at no cost to you. All our team members’ holidays are booked in such a way that someone is a few hours away available to sort your issue, especially if it’s urgent.

For example, there’s a faulty connector that starts leaking after 8 months. We would come as soon as possible (generally we can be there in as little as 2 hours for emergencies with our projects), replace the faulty part, and then return at a later date to rectify any damage this might have caused. Sometimes this involves many things like removing the flooring, partially refitting some other items, and so on, something that it would be really expensive to rectify otherwise.

Even more, many times we do repairs that are obviously not our responsibility. Good after customer service has been probably our best marketing technique so far, something that our competition doesn’t really understand. Almost every single time we returned to a customer when there was an issue, we had a referral from that customer or other project. Helping you is helping us, so you can rest assured you’ll have an excellent warranty in place!