‘I’ve been too scared to go to work’: my life as a builder in badly behaved Britain
I have been a builder since I was a teenager. I have also worked as a fisher and a tree surgeon, but I always return to building, because it’s the one thing I think I’m good at.
We get all sorts of awkward customers – especially after a job has been completed. Once, I was called at 5am: a towel rail was hanging 45 degrees off the wall. When I arrived at the property, the husband looked terribly sheepish and the wife said: “It just fell off.” She took the kids to school while the husband said: “OK, what do we need to fix it?”
I bolted it back on, but when the wife returned she said: “We’re not paying. It was clearly your mistake.” I imagine the husband had tripped over a kid’s toy, or something, and ripped it off the wall.
On another occasion, I had been called to fix a roof that required re-slating. It took a couple of days. After I had finished the job, I got a call from the client, who said the slates were falling off.
When I went back, there were all these ladders – clearly, they had been up to have a look at the roof, not trusting that I had completed the job properly. They must have been wobbling around and broken some of the slates, which had fallen off. They insisted no one had been up there. It took me another two or three hours to fix it – unpaid, again, because supposedly it was my fault.
There has always been bad behaviour to contend with in this job. When I started as a teenager, I was working with a friend, whose father was also a builder, and we got too scared to go to work. The customer – a woman in her 40s – was wearing less and less clothing each day we turned up. She kept saying: “Have you got a girlfriend?” I was still at sixth form college and terrified, so we bailed on the job.
I also know a painter who went to work for a different woman and found her lying on the bed, expectantly. He said he just shut the bedroom door and started painting. Half an hour later, she appeared, fully clothed, and said: “Would you like a cup of tea?” like nothing had happened.
The pandemic didn’t really change things. There haven’t been enough people in the trade for a decade. Both my sons are now at university; when they were growing up, I had thought they might help me, but they earned more working as baristas than I could afford to pay them.
I get all my work through word of mouth. First-person referrals mean I can’t mess up – but neither can the customer. My whole ethos is: I don’t care how long it takes or how much it costs, you get what you want. People ring up saying: “Another builder has gone badly wrong. Can you take over?” It’s always because they went with the cheapest quote. Often, they have been quoted less than the cost of the raw materials, so no wonder it went wrong. You get what you pay for.
