We have been in our Redrow “House From Hell” for 16 months and are finally laying our first flooring (tiled kitchen). We are still living out of cardboard boxes and are about to pay 3k out of our own pockets (all of our savings…) to have our upstairs floors fixed as the beams are at different heights across the house making the chipboard floors badly unlevel (our last remaining major fault with the house, redrow eventually conceded a fault existed & botched the repair & left it as it was).

We have suffered the same repeated botched repair attempts for every fault with our donwstairs concrete floors being screeded a total of 7 times before an outside contractor finally fixed the entire botttom floor (eigth repair) as all the concrete was also so badly unlevel that floor coverings couldnt be laid. We still have carpet and vinyl waiting in the store warehouses (after a year 3 months they arent too happy either).

We had a snagging and scratchables list combined of nearly 300 items many of which where large serious faults and also included many blanket statements like “fix all plaster faults in the room” & “all paint faults”. a great deal of our stress and frustration has come not only from having a house presented to us that was completely unfinished with multitudes of faults in every room and surface, but in the fact that we had to fight to prove that all the major faults actually existed.

It has been a long slow fight and struggle but we are nearly at a point where this christmas may not actually be cancelled (as last years was, 11 planned friends and family guests had to make alternative plans, as did we).

Unfortunately we wont have any money left to pay for a table and chairs, and all the other things that were planned as we’ve spent the money on – lawyers, surveyors, about 1.5k of phone calls since we moved in, and countless expenses that we werent expecting..

We have been moved out of the house twice for repairs to be carried out (a week at a time, 3 different rooms between 2 different hotels both times.) We have had so many run ins, arguments, meetings with MD’s, written so many letters (a total of about 25 pages between them), been through lawyers, surveyors, building control, NHBC, the media (we’re about to be in our local paper for the 2nd time) – its just unbelievable!!

I have a number of favourite Redrow screw ups to tell people, but just to pick 3 small simple ones as examples:-

(1) The electrician who after stripping the threads on the electrical switch/socket faceplate mounting boxes (in the wall tiled kitchen) by using ‘clipped’ shorter screws which destroyed the threads of the mountings decide to permenantly hold the faceplates onto the tiles using a surround of clear silicon on all the plates! He couldn’t understand why i was so angry with the appalling mess…

(2) The driveway – we noticed just as they were about to lay the top coating that they had copied the wrong house reference points for the width and it was only big enough for 1 car not 2, and we had to point out a correct example and show the plans before they would believe us and get the site manager to agree to change it…

(3) The cloak/toilet door that on 1st entering the house we noticed the latch fouled & scraped through the nearby plasterboard wall before closing (they had noticed the fault and shaved the skirting board flat to allow it to shut).

Short summarised faults list:
We have had problems with: window frames, window glass, rear drainage, water ingress into the garage, upstairs and downstairs entire floors not flat or level, the wrong kitchen was installed, we paid extra for flat ceilings and they had artexed them, the retaining wall between the road and our house is made from slabs on their end (no strength or longevity) and doesnt have drainage, all the plaster and paint everywhere was sub standard (every single surface, door, wall, etc!), there was overspill and dripped paint plaster everywhere, the entire house interior was full of dirt and plaster lumps, all of our door handles and internal metalwork was runied and tarnished by paint spillage, large areas of our external brickwork were replaced or re-mortared, our garage door didnt close and lock, our front door lock didn’t work on the day of entry, we had bare electrical wires exposed in several wires on entry, plumbing and a leak, many of the wall corner plaster tapes were ‘popped’ and needed replaced, some ducts didnt reach the external vents, and so on..