We are loving these Star Trek inspired air-powered doors at DIY Doctor which we found via dornob.com.
They have been fitted by a DIY geek in America, and even have the whooshing air sound as they are powered by compressed air.
Watch the video and see what you think……
Winter maintenance for your home is vital. We have a project identifying several jobs to be done at this time of year. These include:
adding drain tidys to keep leaves etc from blocking your drainsIf you need to get a professional tradesperson in to do any home improvement jobs, you can get free quotes via our Find a Tradesman service, which finds appropriate, insured tradespeople in your local area .
No more DIY, the 2012 home trend is DIT
Doing It Yourself has become a thing of the past as new research from Bosch Power Tools finds that Brits are much more likely to ‘Do It Together’. This new trend is set to spread in 2012 as 56% of Brits claim that home improvements are top of their New Year’s resolution list with spending more time on a hobby and going on a diet following behind.
The study also revealed that Brits are a helpful bunch with 78% having helped a friend or relative with their DIY tasks in the past. And nearly two thirds take their own power tools along to get the job done – it’s a serious task after all!
If you live in London, don’t expect a neighbour to help…
The findings show that the age old tradition of people being friendlier up North may well be true. 72% of those questioned in the North of England had recently helped out a family member with DIY compared to only 65% of those in London and the South East.
And it seems that neighbours are the ones who miss out as shockingly only 34% of Londoners are prepared to assist a neighbour compared to 55% of Northerners.
For more information about Bosch Power Tools and projects you can complete with your friends, neighbours or on your own, please visit www.bosch-do-it.co.uk.
Everything preceding this blog post explains the number of complaints against tradespeople in the UK. Unfortunately the problem of unsatisfied customers is further expanded by the home improver doing little research into the actual project they want doing.
Way back in 1990, in a paper called Building Procurement, A. Turner summed up the problem succinctly when he stated “All things being equal, as any customer knows, you can probably have what you want if you know what it is. If you do not know exactly what you want, you will probably end up with partly, or totally, what you don’t want.”
Home owners rely on builders to sometimes read their minds when, full discussion at the outset, via a medium such as the DIY Doctor Desired Outcome Building Contract will remove any doubt in the home improver’s mind.
The Which report of August 2011 concluded that 2.5 million people have had a dispute with a builder or decorator in the last 3 years and the most common disagreement was the quality of the work.
Other complaints were mostly about bad timekeeping by traders and properties being left very untidy. The report also states that 25% of homeowners went ahead with the work despite not receiving a written quote or contract from the trader.
Finally the report concludes that almost 20% of complaint cases in 2010 ended up in court.
As if all those statistics were not bad enough, Trading Standards reports that in 2011 £170m was stolen by cowboys in 2010 through taking deposits and not finishing work
DIY Doctor’s own survey in October 2011 showed
In the final part of this story we are pleased to announce that we are working very hard to eliminate the risks involved with employing tradespeople of any kind in your home. Our Home Improvement Protection Solution offers peace of mind with many practical measures that can be taken to protect your home. We have much more lined up.
Please post your comments to help us provide the best support we can for home improvers.
Experian, a global credit information group, lists over 515,000 companies in a huge number of categories in the construction industry. In its public database, where it uses information from Yellow Pages and other sources, there are categories ranging from Energy Conservation Consultants to Sash Window Repairers.
However, a 2010 report commissioned by Key Note Market Research lists only 340,000 ‘firms (employing around 2 million people)’ actually registered to the industry through HMRC, Trade Associations, Companies House.
This means there could be as many as 200,000 unregistered companies out there. These are guys that are deliberately getting under the radar in any form of registration including the most basic of requirements, Public Liability Insurance.
The Key Note House building report 2011 states that the output of the housing sector was estimated to be £32.6bn. The private sector accounts for 68% of this output, with repair, maintenance and improvement accounting for 50% of that amount.
This totals £11bn being spent in an industry where, according to the surveys, almost 40% of the industry workforce is not registered as an accountable agency!
From a survey conducted by the Federation of Master Builders in the last quarter of 2010 it is seen that 32% of registered building companies has experienced a decline in the work coming in. This, it was concluded, was due in part by more DIY work being undertaken as well as more work being given to the cheaper, unregistered tradesmen. This in turn was seen to be due in part to the increase in the VAT rate to 20%.
Enquiries to the FBM for renovation and repair work were down 25% in the first quarter of 2011 indicating that a great many home improvers are looking for cheaper ways of getting work done. This confirms what DIY Doctor has been saying for a long time. Home owners think they are saving money by employing unregistered trades.
(Source: Federation of Master Builders, State of Trade survey Q1, 2011)
While researching the number of small construction companies that have public liability insurance DIY Doctor has only been able to find information dating back to 1999 where a commercial insurance for small businesses Market Assessment was done by Key Note Market Intelligence and noted that insurance in general is a low priority for small businesses with public liability being ignored as an acceptable risk.
You can find out more about avoiding cowboy builders by using our Home Improver Protection Solution.
Please post your comments to help us provide the best support we can for home improvers.
