Byford & Hammond Ltd

An honest review. At first, everything went well but as the new build progressed it became apparent that we would need to challenge the quality of their workmanship constantly. Being a new build, you would expect the house to be straight and plumb. One of our door frames is 10mm higher at one end, at one stage there were two doors next to each other with a 10mm difference in height (this was corrected when pointed out but shows that no-one was checking the tradesmans work). One of our steel supports has the ceiling plasterboard meeting into the support instead of around it like the other support does. The shadow gaps on the first floor range from zero gap to over 15mm, now we have to pay for skirting boards to hide these mistakes. The 1st floor render prep is appalling, we have a 30mm gap at either end of the aluminium capping but no gap in the middle. One of the 1st floor rendered walls appears to curve from left to right and up and down it curves. Byford will try and blame this on our render contractor, but they could only apply the render to the cement board provided by Byford which clearly had not had a laser or spirit level anywhere near it. The plastering was also appalling, even after weeks of work from the decorator the walls still have ripples down them where the plaster was not correctly finished. When we asked if these issues could be rectified, we were told by Matt Hammond that there wasnt really anything they could do now. Once we kicked Byford off site, every contractor that we employed since Byford left commented on how not a single wall was straight and laughed at Byfords mistakes, it was embarrassing. Our stair manufactures charged us an additional £500 to come to site to install the stairs because they said none of the walls were straight. Regarding the quote, I would not allow Byford to use PC sums either as these turned into 3 to 4 times the amount quoted. If you expect the builder you have chosen to use a laser, spirit level and tape measure, to care about the build and not focus solely on the amount of money they can get from you then these guys are not for you. Would I recommend them? Absolutely not, they made what could have been a nice, exciting project a horrible one from start to finish and my new contemporary home does not have a straight wall in it or the sharp finish we had hoped for. A classic case of a building company saying they can work to your expected standard but in reality, fall very short of it.