Building Dilemma

[Mrs_Pegasus]

I posted this http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Law/Civil/Quest ion734069.html You will see that this was back in April and I have still not got a completed extension to my property! The current state of affairs is that I continued to contact the builder to come and meet with me to decide the best way forward to bring the work to a speedy conclusion. I was basically ignored. I then sent a letter asking for him to remove all materials from site within 10 days and listed my main gripes i.e. uneven walls/floors/tiling etc. He turned up on the 10th day asking for a 2nd chance. I am in a situation where I just want the work finished. There is probably about 3 days work here. There is approximately 10% of work outstanding and 20% of payment I owe. This job has been on the go since November 2008, simply garage conversion with additional utility room. Other houses in the same road have had the same work done in under 3 months. Is it reasonable for the contractor to demand the original agreed price? I was verbally given 12 weeks maximum to complete the work. No builder has been on site since April 14th. No contact until last Friday. Views please.

[buildersmate]

You are indeed a patient lady, Mrs P.
If you are sure you are behind the curve on making payments versus work complete, then you could still reject his recent approach and just get the work done by someone else.

When you raising the 1st question, you indicated that the quality of the work was not an issue - just the timeliness. Now you are saying the walls and floors are uneven. Are you therefore expecting these to be taken up and redone? It is not easy to correct uneven plastering or screeding. Tiled surfaces that are unacceptable have to be taken up, scrapped and retiled.
What exactly has to be done (roughly describe it) to complete and how much money is unpaid versus the original contract sum?
The trouble with builders is they want a steady flowline of work. So some start more jobs than they know they can can complete in the time that they said, so they have work to go back to when the 'front-end' of the supply chain starts to dry up.