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PollyJay
We're in the middle of a 'Homefit' of 3 bathrooms - Our journey started in June 2016 and throughout we sought assurance from B&Q that our rooms could be completed by 3/12, when we have 16 people coming to stay from all over the UK and overseas. "Oh yes, plenty of time", they said in June when they estimated the cost, and again in July when we checked again it would be finished in time before paying (and again as recently as 31/10). Friday 27/10, the working day before the job was due to start and after products had already been delivered, we got a call in the afternoon saying the installer had just made contact to say he couldn't start the job, so they would have to find another. We had time booked off work, dog in kennels, the lot. The area manager apparently then worked a miracle and found another installer who could start on 9/11. Long story short, since 9/11 a single fitter has been here only 7 days (well not even full days) and boy had B&Q and that area manager lied to us. Paperwork stuck to products proved that when stock was picked, the fit date was already set as 14/11, so they knew our job wasn't starting on 31/10 well before the 27/10 when they bothered to tell us. Anyway it's gone from lie to disaster, our guests are due this Friday and we won't even have one bathroom finished. As for project management, we've had to do it - chasing round after missing stock, making them re-do pipes that they put in the wrong wall, and so on. The 'Trusted Trader' contracting firm doing the work has actually sub-contracted the work to other sole traders - and we've not even seen the guy who has the 'Trusted Trader' status! The fitter we see most seems really decent but we think he's probably having to fit other jobs around ours - existing jobs he had booked for himself. Now we've been told 20 boxes of tiles for one of the bathrooms are not available and we have to choose something else (but apparently they'll refund us the original cost if we can't find anything else suitable at B&Q so we can buy from elsewhere [hmm B&Q, however we source our tiles, we're not paying a penny extra - B&Q WILL be paying for any financial loss we suffer because of their negligence]). Plus we suspect we're due the same story about radiators that we paid for 4 months ago. When we went to track down a bath tap yesterday, a guy in the B&Q showroom said that somebody 'high-up' is sorting out the widespread missing product problem. He explained they own Screwfit, or it's the same group, and although Screwfit deliver many of the products on time into a 'holding' warehouse, by the time delivery to the customer arrives, half of it (like expensive taps and so on) have gone walkabouts! We didn't even think to look at reviews online; I think we were just blinded by the propaganda that's all over the promotional material about, "Which Trusted Trader" and the assumption that a large brand like B&Q is going to be OK, but how wrong we were. We're just at the start of this nightmare really...we know we probably have much worse to come...but please let this be a lesson. Don't touch B&Q Homefit with a bargepole. And know your rights as a consumer - the law won't allow them to ride roughshod over you, no matter what their contract might say. And remember what they said to you - after you pay the £50 for the survey, at which time the surveyor checks the site against the estimate and can go back to B&Q and raise any issues, the price cannot change afterwards - so if like us (as an example) they charge you £167 to install an extractor fan, but forgot to add the actual extractor fan to the stock list, then that's on them, not you. Back soon...or maybe it'll be next summer by the time they finish!
8 years ago
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B&Q has a 2.2 average rating from 2,597 reviews