Barratt builders are useless. (Barratt Homes)

Member Name: bonz

Product:	Barratt Homes
Date:	23/04/02 (7519 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: nice-looking

Disadvantages: cheaply built

I moved into a Barratt bungalow just over a year ago. They look lovely inside with pretty little gardens to th efront and rear. I thought it would be great to move into a new home, since the previous home I lived in was Victorian and it was full of leaky roofs.

When I moved in there was a brown stain on the living room wall. What on earth was it? First thing I thought of was damp.

I didn't bother with a surveyor because it was a new house (7 years old). The thing was I wanted the house anyway, so I saved the cost of one. I thought there can't be anything that major about it, being 7 years old. If there was, I'd find out and fix iy anyway. Hence I saved money. Looking back I still wouldn't have bothered. But just to warn you, just because a house is new doesn't mean there isn't anything wrong with it.

Anyway, back to the damp. How was this caused? Well to find out, I looked atthe other side of the wall, which was the bathroom. The place where the stain was, was where the bath was on the other side. Ok, so i'm getting closer. I'm also starting to worry.

On removing the side of the bath, to my horror, the whole floor (MDF, of course when you are dealing with new homes) was saturated!!!!!It was also rotting through. What a nightmare when you've just moved in!!!

I called a plumber out straight away and asked him how this could have happened. After examining the bath, he told me that whoever had fitted the bath had not fitted it correctly and it was sinking!!!! Everytime a person stood in the bath to take a shower it sank! This led the bath to come away from the wall, alowing the shower water to flow down the side of the bath, thus wetting the floor - and the wall!

OH MY GOD!

In order to repair it, he had to take the bath out completely and re-fit it. But before he could do that, he had to dry off the floor and replace the rotten MDF. The drying out
phase took about 3-4 days.

Great, he'd repaired the bath, even though it was expensive to do. But I liked the bungalow, its location, so I just wanted it fixed.

One further problem, though. Whenthe plumber removed the bath, he had to take some of the tiles off with it. He asked me if I had any spare ones to replace them. I looked everywhere, but there were none! Oh dear, that means I had a nice bath but the tiles around it would have to be different. I wanted my bathroom to look nice, not shoddy, so I decided to re-tile the whole bathroom.

I don't think I should have been in this position, since I don't expect a bath that was fitted 7 years a go to start sinking because the fitter hadn't fitted it properly. After all, this is Barratts we are talking about.

I have since watched a TV programme all about how rubbish Barratt houses are, and how much they are done on the cheap. Well I'm in total agreement there.

I've since re-fitted my kitchen because that was tatty and cheap. The carpets that were in (they were the original ones from seven years ago) were GREY!!!! and one of the bedroom walls was grey! So I scrapped all of those.

Without losing my cool abou all this, I remained calm, thinking that in the end my bungalow will look just the way I want it to. And I will be assured it will last a while after all the re-decorating.

My bungalow now looks really beauiful, but it is of no credit to Barratts - I practically re-gutted the whole house!

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