Vet Rachael Yost is used to expecting the unexpected, but she says nothing prepared her for the year-long wrangle she is still facing after deciding to have a conservatory fitted to her Heaton home.
Rachael and her partner Oliver Dearden splashed out ££44,662 on a fancy orangery on the back of their home in the Newcastle suburb, but more than 12 months later, fed-up Rachael, 38, says she wished she had never started on the project.
After shopping around, the couple opted to use Pennine Home Improvements for their dream extension and paid a deposit for work to start on May 3, 2022. However, although materials were delivered the week before, Rachael says the start day came and went, with the only contact from Pennine being an email asking for the next payment as work had started.
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"I called Pennine to say that work absolutely had not started and the start date was put back to May 9, but they didn't actually turn up to work until May 10, which was a bad start," said Rachael. "Things just got worse from then on. I had specifically agreed with the contracts manager that my patio would be saved, but I came back from work on May 10 I was angry to see that my patio flags had been sawn through. But then things just snowballed from there."
Rachael's catalogue of complaints included:
- An argument over work needed to a sewer before the build could begin. Rachael claims that Pennine told her they could carry out the work needed prior to the build and contacted Northumbrian Water with technical drawings of the proposed work. However she says she had to stop concrete being poured over the sewer by Pennine contractors before the work was carried out, and said the contracts manager then claimed Pennine did not know the amount of work involved.
- Rachael claims she was told that 4.2m bi-fold doors into her garden from the orangery would not be a problem, then was initially told they would cost an extra £7k as the maximum span available is 3.8m. The problem was eventually resolved at no extra cost.
- Rachael said she discussed and agreed with Pennine that her patio slabs were to be saved, boards would be put down to protect the floors and doors and the garden boarded to protect the grass. She says none of this happened, and several patio slabs were cut through and there was interior damage, damage to her driveway and mismatched door and window handles.
- The couple's home was flooded after the builders built a wall over a drainpipe that they had previously broken. Despite the builder saying this would be sorted on the next working day, when Rachael returned from work she claims that it had not been sorted and the builders had carried on building the wall over the broken drainpipe. This had to be removed and water drained in to the new foundations until the plumber came to sort it.
- After the builders started one week late, there were long periods of time when there was no progress as no-one turned up. Rachael says communication between herself and Pennine was poor, with emails and phone calls going unanswered and call back requests being ignored.
Rachael and Oliver were angry to receive a request for the payment due when the work started to be made on the day when the build was supposed to start but the builders did not turn up. She then received a letter at the beginning of this year saying that the final payment had been made and the guarantee was sent. She claim that she assumed this meant that Pennine had accepted the build had not gone according to plan and had waived the final payment. However, when she tried to claim under the guarantee for a leaking roof and unfinished steps, she was told that the letter had been sent in error and the final instalment was due, reduced as the snagging had not been completed. Recovery proceedings were threatened if the bill was not settled in seven days.
- Rachael says the conservatory is still not completed to her satisfaction. She says the floor is so uneven that the dining table cannot be used, there is damage to the house, garden and drive, mismatched door furniture and wobbly steps.
- Pennine carried out work to repair the leaking roof and wobbly steps to the garden in May, but Rachael says she has been waiting for the guarantee certificate for a month, and despite chasing up Pennine about this, has not received any communication.
"The whole thing was just a shambles from beginning to end," said Rachael. "It started with a skip being delivered unnannouced which caused issues with our neighbours and a year later, we are still waiting for the guarantee certificate and are being ignored again. We just want to warn others so they are not as disappointed as we are. We feel we spent a lot of money and it ended up causing us so much stress we sometimes wish we had never started."
The Chronicle made several attempts to contact Pennine Home Improvements over the course of two weeks, but has had no response by email. A notice on the website reads: Please note: Due to a power outage, our phone system is down until further notice."
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