Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 10)

…is how much time they invest in making sure that you are happy with their service/product after the product/service has been bought.

I am getting increasingly fed up of companies who invest huge (often disproportionate) amounts of time in getting your order.  And then, once you have placed the order, are hardly ever to be seen again.  It is not unusual to get bombarded with phone calls from sales folks in the run up to a sale, however, once the order is placed, they are then difficult to get hold of, or in some cases, never return your calls!  And certainly, never when there is an issue.  That now appears to be someone else’s problem (usually someone you have never heard of in the “delivery team”).

Once they have your money, it seems to be about delivering the service/product at the cheapest cost possible, and any interet in your as a customer, or your satisification with their product or organisaton, goes out the window.

This is hugely disappointing, and IMHO, no way to run a business.  We shouldn’t be treating the sales process as purely a transaction, but should be looking at it in terms of building a realtionship.  In this day and age, as products and services become more similar, it is often only the way that we deal with customers that separates the different companies.  Surely, this is well understood these days.  But alas, it would appear not.

I would love to be able to spot these “sales heavy/ delivery light” organisations upfront.  Then, I could avoid them!  But like many things in life, you don’t find out until it is too late!

There was a white uPVC conservatory on the back of the building when we bought it.  There was a lead flashing along the edge of the roofline that had been cut into the original stonework.  Unfortunately, this left an upside down “V” cut into the stonework.  We had a go at pointing the grooves, but they were still very obvious.

We decided to replaced the marked stones with spare ones that we had sandblasted recently. By the time, these new stones have been pointed in, it will be hard to tell where these stones have been replaced.

Just the brick base of the conservatory remains, but you can see the outline of where the roof had been.

The conservatory is now all gone, however, you can the marks left along the old roofline of the conservatory..

There was a uPVC conservatory on this part of the building and the lead flashing had been fitted into the stonework. Unfortunately, this had left an upside down “V” shape cut into the stone. We have replaced each of the stones with ones without the groove cut in them.

Despite the mud and poor weather, we managed to get a large truck on site today to pick up the scaffolding.  We took this down before Christmas and we have been tripping over it ever since!  There was a lot of it and now that it has gone you can start to see a difference in the overall site.  It won’t be long and the back field will start looking like a field again!

We are now in the final stages of the outside work. There really is only pointing left to do. Today, the scaffolding was collected and this has cleaned up the site tremendously. We still have so cleaning up to do, but there was a awful lot of scaffolding piled up in the back field.

We are getting to the stage where we need to start sorting out the finishing touches.  There are a lot of decisions to be made here – doors, handles, lights, tiles, etc.  This is also the stage of the project where the costs start to mount up quickly – often on items that you might not have thought about.

All of the door furniture was delivered today.  This included all of the door handles, hinges, latches and bath room locks.

We are using a brushed stainless steel finish through the house.  This means not just the door furniture, but also the electrical sockets and switches.  All of these components are from the Schneider Get Ultimate range – screwless face plates in satin stainless steel.

We are using engineered oak internal fire doors throughout the property.  We don’t need to use fire doors to meet building regulations, however, these doors are thicker (44mm) and heavy than normal internal doors. These heavy doors have more of a quality feel for only a small additional cost. These have been bought from Oakwood Doors in Huddersfield.  They are going to be pre-finished (with a sation matt lacquer) and should be delivered before the end of January.

Due to the size and weight (around 30kgs) of the doors we are using 3 hinges per door (each hinge is 4″).  We have 20 doors in total, so we need 30 pairs of hinges.

The handles are from Zoo Architectural Hardware.  They are called Florence and we have already used them on the 2 pairs of external doors to the property.  It turns out that this model is end of life.  This is good news as they can be picked up very cheaply – £8.50 pair rather than £20 a pair.  I have bought a couple of spare handles since they are going out of production, but still a great buy.  We could have easily have paid twice as much for an alternative.

We have selected bathroom thumb turn locks so that they match the Zoo handles above.  They aren’t from Zoo, but the finishes are a good match.

We are using EuroSpec latches on all the internal doors – the latches are larger for the bathrooms to accomodate the bathroom lock in the same machanism.  All of the latches are 3″ latches – latches come in a variety of sizes with 2.5″ and 3″ being the most popular.

All of the door furniture came fromt the Door Handle Company who were extremely helpful in finding all the rights bits.  The delivery was very quick – taking only 4 days from ordering over the phone and the items being delivered.

Yep, another hose bites the dust.  One way or another, they don’t seem to last very long.

At least this one is connected to an outside tap!

Mmmm…this is what happens if you repeatedly drive over a hose pipe! I am not sure how many hose pipes that we have damaged during the build. We normally cut the damaged end off before it becomes too short and it is thrown away.