Tale of Not Woe!

You're pretty used to hearing me moan on about the quality of service one gets nowadays. Well. Christmas has sent a little tale of cheer.

After my new window was fitted on Monday, it became clear that fixing the leaking downpipe and getting the wet plaster redone was going to have to be done sooner rather than later. I looked through the bunch of flyers I've collected and settled on one. I phoned on Monday evening.

The guy arrived next morning and looked at the problem, noticing in the process a couple of others of similar kind. The house will be 110 years old next month, and the guttering is as old as the house. His quote seemed to me to be extremely reasonable.

He was going for supplies, and said he would return on Thursday morning, which he did, but he did not replace the damaged pipe there and then, but had one of his lads remove the old one, to give the wall a chance to dry as much as it could in 24 very cold hours.

Today he dropped off a couple more lads, who manouevred a very long ladder through the house without damaging anything. They took about an hour to do the fixes they had promised, even though the problems at the top of the ladder were even worse than they'd anticipated. A whole run of gutter will have to be replaced in the future, and as I want a cast iron one, like the old one, the boss said it would be more expenxive than the plastic I settled for with the downpipe. I was expecting a huge sum - he quoted £350, which, again, I find extremely reasonable.

As I expected, the internal plastering will have to wait till the wall is much drier, so at present the job remains unfinished. How much of the £110 (hey, that's £1 for every year of the house's life!) he will be collecting did he ask for today? Not a penny!

I will employ this man again.