Extras How To Spot a Good Builder

Date Published:

19/06/2008

Want to know how to find a good builder? Look at his van, says Kevin McCloud. I promise to reveal one of the great secrets of the built world: how to choose a builder.

It's a lost art; like water divining, or even plumber divining. I have teased you with this arcane gift for too long, so here is my method. Does it require, 1) a cheque for £34.50 payable to me, plus an sae? Certainly not. That's not nearly enough money. Does it need you to, 2) join the local lodge of the Freemasons or Noble Fraternity of Beaver Brothers? No again.

Unless you want to meet people in unhygienic furry hats or are thinking of becoming a policeman, judge or (flight of suspicious fancy here) a planning officer; because to me the world of Freemasonry doesn't seem to have much to do with masonry in the Free World.

Does it perhaps mean 3) putting your tender document out to three separate main contractors for detail quotation? That's what all the experts tell you to do in the one-and only vaguely useful column of the weekend paper's 'Property and Home You'll Never Own' supplement. That's assuming you haven't already binned it with the even more useless ‘You and Your Lack of Money' supplement. No, and don't go on personal recommendation either, since recommending any builder, plumber or electrician usually leads to the irreperable breakdown of friendships (recommendor vs recommendee: tradesman gets paid and buggers off home).

The best method, deviously buried deep inside this column, is to check out their vans. This is not so easy. When can you find a tradesman's van near a building site?

Extensive research has shown that when identified on the open road and randomly followed, 97 per cent of builders' vans are heading for the caff. The rest are parked at a golf club. To find a building project in Britain, follow an empty skip lorry - or the local thief as he sets off to nick a cement mixer from an abandoned site. Why not inspect the most recent job that the seemingly polite contractor directs you to? Why not look at the photographs that he desperately wants to show you? Because the state of a builder's wheels is the best reflection of his attitude to life, work and humanity.

A van may be the apotheosis of builder's pride - or the wretched, sordid manifestation of a troubled soul. He may cherish it, keep it fed and watered and stock it orderly with polished tools. Or he may abuse it like a Neanderthal and slowly stockpile the back with an incipient avalanche of tortured, filthy pickaxes, burnt-out grinders and off-cuts of contorted second-hand plumbing.

This will all be unrecognisable under a thickly trowelled blanket of caked mud that has formed a heap of dust in the corners of the loadspace, blurring the distinction between dirt and rust.

The fastidious builder displays his tools and van with pride, like a farmer showing his prize Hereford Bull complete with polished dangly bits. He treats it as his masterpiece.

The rebel builder parks his van three streets away from your house, and decorates his dashboard with a selection of everyday builder's trash, including the mandatory yellowing copy of The Sun and blackening banana skin.

He says he's put 'security film' on the back windows (that's the badly applied, wrinkled, bubbled, sticky-backed silver plastic stuff ) to protect his tools. He's also fitted an enormous padlock to the door for the same reason. Don't be fooled. The tools are worth nothing. He doesn't want to keep villains out: he wants to keep you out, and the truth hidden.

You can be sure that within two days of finishing your extension, a sinister brown patch will appear on the kitchen ceiling. If you spot his tools thrown into a huge pile in the back, so you will find your kitchen units thrown together with equal negligence. In the back of his van will be several dozen empty aerosols of No More Nails, the squirty spray-on bodger's adhesive. More worryingly, you may find cans of No More Screws and No More Bolts. Collectively, these products can soon lead to No More House. It's far better to employ the man with the glistening saw and sharpened chisel, I say. This man has lovingly fitted his mum's off-cut of Wilton carpet to the rear of his van to pamper his tools after a long day's wielding. The man with the shiny alloy wheels wins.

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