We have voted on the winner of the 2009 Cowboy Of The Year Award. As always we find that reviewing the photos of poor workmanship, unsafe situations and everything in between only reminds us that there are those out who don’t give a damn about hurting people. The hurt is sometimes only financial but in many cases the poor workmanship is very much a booby trap that can harm, maim or kill without notice.

We choose the Cowboy Of The Year Award based on a few factors. The first is always safety, the second is the camouflage factor or the level to which the bodge is hidden away and the third factor is the cost of the damage caused or the cost to repair the bodge. So for example this year we had a close contest between the winner and a poor plumbing & central heating job that cost thousands to put right. The runner up however was not as much unsafe as inconvenient and costly to repair. This years winning bodge was UNSAFE, well hidden and costly to put right!

Last year we offered up the three categories of individual we feel sums up the poor workmanship we have seen. If you had to place poor workmanship into only three categories they would these:

1. Johnny Cut Corners – who gets the job done faster than humanly possible gets the cash and gets out usually with poor and unsafe end results
2. Harry Houdini – who starts the job with vigour but then has lots of excuses for not showing up until one day ‘POOF’ – like magic he disappears
3. Bit Off More Than He Can Chew Charlie – who start a job larger than they can cope with and in many cases won’t stop no matter what happens even when unqualified to undertake certain aspects of the job. These guys usually pull a Houdini late in the job.

The latter is the most dangerous from what we see on a day-to-day basis. Although the contractor may be a fully qualified builder, brick layer, carpenter or other such trade person he is not necessarily qualified in electrics, gas, central heating or plumbing. Without the knowledge or clear understanding of what they’re doing, without TEST equipment to check their work and without a thought to the home owners, neighbours, apprentices or even themselves these are the most dangerous person out there. Although a lot of what we see on a daily basis is dangerous with a small ‘d’ many of the jobs we see are DANGEROUS with a capital ‘D.’

The 2009 Cowboy Of The Year Award is from July of this year (original article here) and goes to the two or three electricians who not only created this mess but also who didn’t make any effort to clean up the mess left by the previous electrician. It highlights in every way why you should check the credentials of your contractor or his mates before allowing work to go ahead.

The story goes something like this:

1. The home owner wants to add a conservatory. They hire a recommended builder. He in turn brought in his electrician who may have known what he was doing but was in no way neat about his work. We found missing earth shielding, loose connector screws and many cables routed incorrectly. The conservatory gets completed and everything appears normal.
2. We then move ahead to the new kitchen which was installed by a large national DIY chain – that also fits kitchens. So in come the kitchen fitters who require an electrician and they too bring in their own contractor. More modifications are made. Now these modifications are interesting. From my point of view this group of electricians either found unsafe work from the previous electrician or created the following issues themselves. Either way you slice it this electrician left dangerous work behind. The unsafe work includes the downstairs bathroom and kitchen (none of the fittings were IP rated for kitchen or bathrooms) sharing light circuits not on RCD, upstairs bathroom (non-IP rated) lights not on an RCD, conservatory lights not on a fused spur or RCD. All the workmanship that we viewed was poor. All of the wiring to the kitchen was run on the bottom plane of the floor joists above using small strips of 9mm drywall placed on the bottom plane of the joist then covered with full sheets of drywall. This allowed for little gaps under the joists for the cables to slip through. Unfortunately it also leaves the cables trapped only 9mm from the surface of the ceiling allowing for possible damage from screwing up the remainder of the drywall to the ceiling. Yet another reason to have RCD protection! MOST IMPORTANTLY this electrician by way of not correcting any errors he found is as guilty as if he’s done the poor work himself. Which I suspect he did.
3. Another electrician also added a spur for the home owners new alarm system. See work here. This too was poorly done with an open connection block that was left with  no cover and hanging down almost to the crawl space floor.
4. Finally we were asked if we could install some new bathroom appliances, add a bathroom extractor and some new lighting. As should be the case we inspected the wiring starting at the unlabeled consumer unit which lead to many other issues throughout the property. The issues weren’t only electrical. We also found poor waste pipe work, poor and leaking central heating pipe work and many electrical issues that didn’t make it to these pages.

I have a steadfast rule which I instill into all of our staff. You touch it you own it! That means that even though you uncover a problem that you didn’t create you still have to do something about it. Most trades people know that there are issues lurking under every floor board and behind every wall. These lurking issues are also why ‘builders’ seem to have a bad reputation for surprise price increases. The truth of the matter sits in the middle between these two extremes. Builders don’t have x-ray vision and therefore cannot see what’s under the floorboards or in the ceiling and home owners have to take responsibility for the work that was previously undertaken whether they owned the property when the work was done or not.

If the previous work was undertaken by a competent operative then things usually go well. If the previous work was undertaken by an incompetent operative then it will require extra work to sort out. If you find something unsafe and decide to keep your mouth shut then you’re as guilty as the person that did the work in the first place. A home owner will be unhappy to hear that the previous builder left unsafe work behind but will be happy that it’s been pointed out to them. With the exception of this home owner who igored our warnings!

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