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“Not a trouble free build - disappointed”

written by Brianh334 on 09/02/2016

I've put this off until I felt that I was "happy". My build time was originally late Nov but completed Jan this year. (NB-Always take a note of name, date and time of anything agreed as it pays dividends with this company).
If you want a standard garage built at Hanson's own timescale and you are available whenever they feel free to fit it, then I'm sure that this could be an excellent product.
Unfortunately, if like me you have something slightly non-standard then be prepared to do a lot of chasing up with their awful customer service. They assume that you can have as much leave as they want at a drop of a hat to suit their schedules (and as long as it’s not on a Friday as it’s not convenient for them!).
The first assistant I contacted couldn’t be bothered to reply to my three calls to confirm things. When I did finally get hold of him he came over as patronising and made me wonder if I was dealing with the "best" of the prefab garage companies. I later discovered that he was well known for upsetting customers, luckily I latched on to someone else and always asked for her whenever I needed to deal with the company.
My first inkling that things weren’t going to be smooth was when they moved their initial install day blaming the garage door manufacturers lead time (over 8 weeks!) which upon ringing Garadors turned out to be a lie, no more than 5 weeks apparently, 3 is the average.
The first delivery was cancelled and a new date arranged.
When the fitters did came they hadn’t been fully appraised of the door bias which meant that they had to leave with most of the walls up but no roof until the correct bits could be sent. They even criticised my base at one point. But when I was recently doing the cement fillet (at the same point) I found a grey wedge under the panel??
I had to have another non-agreed date for delivery (lucky my mate was available again) and a revisit to almost finish it, but I couldn’t have the red brick fronts I wanted. Repair team came in Jan to do last bits. I've left out the myriad of calls I needed to make to achieve this and thus would have looked even more of a rant!

To recap. I wish I'd built the garage myself and not worried about the warranty with its variable guarantees in the small print. It’s not all 10yrs! I know that my build quality and finishing would have been superior. I would have got the roof straight at least. It’s not a bad product; it’s just let down by lousy support that makes you feel helpless, they need to improve on keeping promises to call you back. I think when a job progresses badly like mine did, it wouldn’t have hurt to have a call from the big boss to make you feel they were taking things seriously and try and get the dates that suited me their customer.
By the way don't even ask for any kind of compensation for time taken off or the fact that the garage wasn't as promised at purchase as they won’t entertain the idea.

PS. Learn this phrase - don't make your problem my problem.