I moved into a new Charles Church home recently. I expected to find snags. As with any large project, building or otherwise, it is inevitable that some things will go wrong. Houses are built by people and nobody is perfect. That's life.

However, what concerns me is the overall standard of workmanship I have found throughout the house. A lot of the work is amateurish, with poor finish and defects to be found everywhere.

I am not a perfectionist or a DIY expert, but I am confident that I could have done a better job myself.

This certainly isn't what I was expecting to find, having paid out a substantial amount of money for a new house.

Most of the problems simply should not have occurred in the first place. It would have been obvious to the tradesperson/contractor/subbie doing the work that it wasn't right, but yet it was left half-done. There is no room/area in the house that is not affected.

The site manager is well-meaning and appears keen to fix the problems, but months after moving in, I still have over 200 outstanding defects. The outstanding items include almost all of the snags identified in the "new home demonstration", which should, by CCs own admission, have been fixed within 14 days.

Several of the snags are common to the other properties on this site. The site manager has even commented that he knew exactly what the cause of a roof leak was because it has happened on every other house too. @#$%! If that's the case, why was the same fault (another job not finished correctly) allowed to be repeated? It's cheaper and easier to do things right the first time, rather than repeatedly fixing the same problem on every property.

For the first couple of weeks I wondered "is it just me?". Judging by the poll results on this site and discussion with my neighbours, I'm clearly not alone in experiencing a very high level of snags. I thought I would share my experiences here so that others will not feel so isolated if they find themselves in the same position.

KD

You are not alone. Owners should talk to each other, you'd be surprised how many times they make the same mistake over and over. It's not only poor workmanship. Problems enter the build process at earlier stages with planning, inspections and method all points of failure.

Do spare a thought for the tradesmen though, if we are told to ignore the by the book method, we have little choice but to comply or take a walk.

My wife and I purchased a brand new Charles Church home in August.

This is our second new home and did not realise you could get as much hassle and bullshit from a housebuilder.

The hassle started just after we signed the missives to our new home. We had negotiated a deal which included 1% of our stamp duty being paid. It was all written down for us and written and signed on Charles Church headed paper , (found out later it was not worth the paper it was written on).

We finally moved in late (charged interest) a bit annoyed about the misleading stamp duty deal, to find out our chimney had been built at least 700mm in the wrong place.

We have now been in for over 4 months and still no further forward. We have had some of our snagging done which included water coming through our ceiling on 2 different occasions.

I would be interested to know if what appears to be poor build quality and lack of supervision is particular just to Persimmon/Charles Church, or is it an industry wide problem, brought about by a lack of skilled personnel? I have bought several new properties in the past and none of them had anything like the number of building errors / snags that I encountered in a purchase of a Charles Church house 3 years ago. However, from what I have seen over the last 3 years I think Charles Church is beginning to get its' act together with regards Custommer Care, perhaps now the issue is construction supervision and the quality of their subcontractors.

You should be grateful that at least you have Scots Law on your side, where you were at least due some compensation for delay in terms of the interest being paid.

Keep the pressure on and keep records of all your telephone conversations re the problems/snags, so you can quote these in the future if necessary.

My partner and myself moved into our Charles Church built home on the 7th Dec and have had no end of troubles since and fully agree that the house seems to have been built by amatuers.

The plumbing has been the main issue for us, including a washing machine that emptied onto the floor and a dishwasher that emptied into the washing machine, yes, they actually joined together the two drainage pipes! Our shower had two settings, hot hot or cold cold, the flush on the toilet was broken. The sink in the kitchen leaked and the one in the bathroom was chipped. You can still pull our cooker out of the unit as it has never been fitted properly and they managed to lay turf over our water meter.

On top of all this the site manager has been terrible. He even used the saying "it isnt my problem" with us. They "found" a key to our house a week after we moved in and then called us at work to ask if they could go in and do the tiling that they had forgotten to do, they then took another 4 days to actually do it and then gave us the key.

My partner had taken the next day off work to wait for someone to fix the washing machine only to find out that the site manager had told them not to come as he didnt have a key to get in! He then implied that it was our fault for asking for our key back. He then told us that he had rearranged the visit for the following day, which I took off work, and they never turned up and the company insisted that they had never been booked.

We've spent the time since we moved in trying to fix the major problems with the house and haven't even started on the smaller bad workmanship issues. It'll no doubt take them a few months to fix it all at the rate theyre going. At least we know charles church/persimmon will be on site for a few more years so we should be able to keep the pressure on for them to do things.

I would also be interested to see which sites in particular have the most problems!

Sorry to hear about your troubles, I think you must be on the same site as us. We have had a host of plumbing problems, when we moved in the water pressure in the shower was terrible, (I could piss harder). I had the site manager and the plumber out who insisted there was no problem. I am no plumber but I did know that this was not right, they have since been round and rectified this and is a lot better. The site manager is a really nice guy , but think he is in the wrong job. The plumber is definately in the wrong job!