R Gilmour & Son

I’m reluctantly giving one star here because you can’t give zero. I can’t recommend this company at all, and it makes me very sad to say that. I saved and saved, and borrowed money from my parents to give this company tens of thousands of pounds to do some remodelling of my house and it is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. I don’t really know where to start, so here’s just a scattergun of the issues that come to mind today. There are many, many more. It was very dusty work affecting just a few rooms of my home and so as I was intending to stay there throughout the 3 week job, they said they would put polythene sheeting over doorways to minimise the mess in the unaffected rooms. No polythene sheeting ever materialised (the conversation was actually denied) and the job ended up taking months so I had to move out, and the clean up took months more. Some of my stuff was just ruined. Many things started going not-​as-​discussed — eg rather than the sink in the en suite being built into the window recess as discussed, the recess got boxed in/​boarded over and the sink stuck on the front which means it takes up much more space than it should. After I had to move out, I tried to pop by every morning to discuss exactly what they were planning to do that day to head-​off these kind of problems. The main guy seemed to find this annoying and told me to stop coming in every day. What? It’s my house!
The plastering seems to have been done by Edward Scissorhands in the ‘Mediterranean’ (ie lumpen) style and tbh looks like he’s used porridge in places and it doesn’t always even come to the edge of the walls. When I complained about this, the boss guy patronisingly told me that *all* plaster looks like that and I would just have to sand it down later. No it doesn’t! I know this because of the thousands of pounds I have since had to spend getting my walls re-​plastered nice and smooth. Not all plaster is lumpen. The shower in the main bathroom could only give out scalding hot water. Turns out the valve was fitted wrong. I’ve since paid a decent plumber to fit it properly. The pipes behind the bath leak because they haven’t been fitted right either but I can’t get that fixed without smashing tiles and removing the bath again. I don’t have the heart or energy for that upheaval so the leak remains. They had to retrofit something in behind a part they had boxed-​in so they smashed a hole in the panelling and again got Edward scissorhands to plaster-​over the hole so the ghost of that error remains. They laid concrete in the dining recess floor. They left a tapered lip along the front edge where it joins the floorboards, meaning we had to chisel up *loads* of concrete to level it off before laying a new floor recently. I asked them to build booth seating in my dining recess, like a restaurant. When upholsterers later came to quote for the job, they said that once the units had been upholstered, your feet wouldn’t touch the ground when you sat down and you wouldn’t be able to access the storage beneath at all. I called the builders to say this and I was waiting for confirmation about the correct dimensions so that they could fix it, but meantime could they please just return my keys (they had ‘finished’ the job and packed up and left a week or so previously but still had my keys). They didn’t really take the criticism of the seating very well so imagine my surprise to come home from work to find they had let themselves into my house without my permission or knowledge and ripped out the bench seating. What? I later paid a proper company who fit-​out restaurants to build another dining booth from scratch, properly. They helped themselves to, ruined and chucked in the skip my v. expensive designer (flat warming gift!) brush and dustpan set. They installed a two-​way fan (ie air comes in and out) right above a soil pipe so my flat smelled like a sewer.
I accept that all building jobs will end up with a snagging list to be addressed when the dust settles. I was prepared for that. My snagging list was sooo long, and many of the things were beyond a mere ‘snag’, they were kind of fundamental. When I tried to discuss the list with the boss guy, I was met with alternating patronising chat (eg saying I was imagining the sewer smell) or just downright confrontation. It was an awful experience.
All in all, the work nearly broke me — emotionally as well as financially. There were so many problems over the months, I don’t have much faith in the (now hidden, but thankfully fully photographed at the time) structural work which was also done.
It really pains me to give such a negative review but I would hate for anyone else to go through the grief I did and to waste quite as much money as I did.