Urbanworks Buckhurst Hill, Essex

We chose Lewis from a selection of builders' quotes sent to us via the mybuilder.com website. He was a very nice young man who we felt we could trust. He assured us he had done lots of jobs like ours, gave us a good price and we thought because he was local, that meant he was more likely to do a good job.

The job consisted of refurbishing a downstairs cloakroom, an upstairs bathroom and decorating out adjoining bedroom. We gave him a finishing date - I was due to hold a family party at home, and needed the cloakroom finished by a specific date.

The cloakroom job ran late, and he came along at the weekend to finish it and we appreciated his doing that.

He suggested the bedroom walls had to be skimmed over before being painted, and he called in someone to do the job - who made a mess of it. When we complained, Lewis at first suggested my husband should rub the lumpy bits down himself. In the end, he did it.

The bathroom job included strengthening the floor - he did it in such a way that meant the floor was raised - and the only way we could later carpet the adjoining room was to install a short ramp.

At some time Lewis says he spoke to my husband about the finish and says that my husband agreed to leave off the architrave. This is disputed.

Half way through the job, Lewis told us we had to hire an electrician to check his electric work as he was not qualified. Had we known that at the outset we would not have allowed him to touch the electrics himself. He also spoke to us about earth bonding, which at the time we knew nothing about, but we now realise this is a legal requirement for bathroom work.

Lewis called in his friend to check his work and give us a certificate. He condemned the lights and the extractor fan that Lewis has installed saying they were both wrong for a bathroom. Lewis blamed his supplier, and then changed them, but we have been concerned ever since that the hidden electric work may be deficient in some way. We got our own electrician to do the earth bonding, so at least we know that is safe.

A short while later we put on the underfloor heating and a tile cracked. We were due to have a surveyor call about a neighbour's outside wall that is leaning towards our property and while he was here I asked him to look at Lewis's work. He was horrified, so incensed that he phoned Lewis the next day about the standard of the work - even the toilet pan is not in square!

When Lewis came over he said the crack in the tile was caused by subsidence, which we know we do not have. He was upset by the way the surveyor spoke to him, but to be honest, he deserved it.

Lewis agreed to come back to rectify various things, like the lack of the architrave, the fact that the door frame is cracking, etc. under guarantee and we expected to hear from him in June (2012). We are still waiting!

The annoying thing is that the other reviews on the mybuilder site for Lewis are glowing - he is a very likeable person, who has an answer for everything, but the job he did here was not very good at all.