Any roof people out there?

My sister and her hubby are in the process of having the barn they bought converted into a habitual home.

Now the builder that is doing the work gave them a quote (not in writing) that the work to take off the old tiles,add felt,batterns and new tiles and insulation and remove some ivy that was growing under the old roof tiles would cost them a price of £12,000.They I think agreed to this price and have had to wait three months for the planning application to be passed as it is a listed building.Anyway they have got the planning permission come through and now the builder says that it is now going to cost them £18,000 to do the job

Does anyone know if the builder can start to change the price of his work at a whim or should my sister and brother in law tell him where to sling his hook so to speak

The builder seems to be rather slow as he and his crew keep vanishing to work on other projects and the date for finishing seems to be a long way off and they thought they would be in for Xmas (the builder said so as well and my sister said to him )which xmas

Any advice from any members with knowledge of this sort of thing would be of great help.

Thanks in advance

 

He's got enough work on, that's why the price has suddenly gone up. If he gets the work at that price it's a bonus, if he doesn't then its no skin off his nose.

For stripping, felt and battening and re tiling i'd be charging around the £6k mark for an average sized roof. Insulation is expensive, especially to bring it up to building regs which is 14 inches off the top of my head, but not quite that expensive

Is it a big roof?

 

We live in a converted barn & our roof is quite large. I'd say always try & get a quote in writing, as otherwise any builder for any work can change what they want for a job. I'd maybe suggest getting another builder out to get a second quote just in case the first one is trying it on

 

If you're not employing a construction professional to sort out legally binding contracts to prevent contractors from upping their prices, then maybe the least you could do is use this http://www.building.co.uk/jct-homeowner-contract-get-the-picture?/3149815.article to enter into legally binding contracts.

 

As the saying goes, a verbal contract is not worth the paper it's written on.

 

This reminds me of somebody who moved into a somewhat dilapidated property in my street who got quotes for "renovating & refurbishing their roof" - probably the terms of a Building Society/Bank mortgage.

So that was the terminology they used to obtain quotations, and being delighted with the lowest quotation, they were somewhat disappointed when all they got was a local idiot sitting on a sofa cushion on their roof for a day removing moss from the tiles with a paint scraper and spending 30 minutes using a putty knife to re-point their chimney stack.

And that idiot who scraped the moss off the roof tiles simply let it fall into the gutters and block the rainwater downpipes, causing cascades of water to fall down the frontages next time it rained. You need to get a proper specification in a proper contract.