Persimmon Homes V

The Never Ending Story

Well, I have to say I'm at the end of my tether. It is unbelievable how frustrated, stressed, and upset my wife and I have become.

My wife has already shed tears over this debacle, and I have to admit I have come very close to doing the same.

I went away on business again on Wednesday, and come back on Thursday. In the meantime, the tilers were supposed to turn up on Thursday, do some screeding in the hall and dining room, and start laying tiles in the kitchen, etc.

They screeded alright - What a stink of damp, concrete-latex stuff, but they decided to leave the tiling for today.

Once again, by 10:30am nobody had turned up, so I have to call the site agent. He gets hold of the tilers, and they send round John. He seems decent enough, but he's not been involved since he lifted the tiles over four weeks ago - four bl**dy weeks with concrete floors ! :-(

Anyway, I had made some measurements this morning, and I found that there was still a problem with the floors throughout. In the kitchen, under a 2m straight edge, I could easily measure 15mm variation.

Persimmon have a specification that reads:

Max. +/- 8mm deviation from 2m straight edge with equal offsets

So the floor can rise or fall by up to 8mm under a 2m edge, and I can measure 15mm in the kitchen, and 25mm in the hall/dining room.

This is after five attempts at levelling the floor with self-levelling compound...

On top of that, the screed in the cloakroom had a bubble of air trapped underneath - it probably came up from the gap between the toilet waste pipe, and the concrete floor, and got trapped when the screed formed a seal. Anyway, this caused the screed to move and crack, so it had to get chiselled out and redone.

Another cracked area appeared in the breakfast area of the kitchen - the tiler has chipped that out too, but didn't have enough screed to fill it back in.

All-in-all, virtually nothing is happing today.

Just to recap:

We moved into this house on the 4th May 2006. The floors on the ground floor were unacceptably uneven. The flooring was all lifted between 11th and 14th July 2006. We have had bare, concrete (dusty) floors ever since (it's now the 4th August). So, happy 3rd month anniversary.

My wife has become very snappy and irritable, very much out of character for her, and me? I'm feeling a lot of mixed emotions, varying from intense anger at the injustice of the situation, to isolation. It seems that no matter how much we try to facilitate a solution, Persimmon simply don't follow through. Frustration is another significant factor - I really feel like lashing out at something but there's nothing there - maybe I need to get a punch bag and hang it up in the garage.

The normal time scales for Persimmon to build a house is 16 weeks. Ignoring the fact that they did absolutely nothing about our floors for the first two months it has taken them the equivalent of 25% of building an entire house, to fail miserably in levelling on single concrete floor...