Fountain Construction Ltd

We had signed up with a different "construction company" who then out-sourced the job to Fountain Construction. We were told that Tom was the "Project Manager" managing our work and were not told that the job had been outsourced. (Discovered it later when we had to write cheques out.) The first week of work --- the men got down and made good progress. Was rather impressive. But after they dug a huge hole (we were building a conservatory, and the work started with the digging of the foundation), they disappeared and the job only got "done" almost a year later. The agreement we had was for the work to be completed in 3 months. They dug the foundation about one foot too little. The plan drawn was for there to be a step into the conservatory but because the foundation was too shallow, the floor level was higher than planned. This then caused the roof to be higher than planned, which meant that the conservatory became an obstruction for our windows in the house. The roof of the conservatory has several leaky spots right from the start, and we told Tom of the problem. At first, he contacted the roofer himself. But when the problem persisted and we contacted Tom again, he told us to contact the roofer directly. This roofer was very poor at responding (often wouldn't pick up the phone and didn't call back when we left messages), and there was no other way of contacting him except through Tom. The roofer didn't seem to have a company address. To be fair, this roofer did come out several times (after a lot of chasing from us) but each time, his attempts to fix the leaks didn't work. The last time he tried to fix the leaks, he broke the double-glazed seal on the roof window instead so we now have a leaky roof and a window that has condensation in what-should-be the sealed unit. We have not been able to get a response from this roofer recently. Looking back, we feel that Tom was dishonest in the roofing aspect of the job. Tom had asked us to go to a particular bricks-and-mortar shop in Northampton to look at samples, as that would be the company who would be doing the roof. After we visited this shop and chose what we wanted, Tom told us that he wasn't going to work with this shop anymore as he'd found a better roofer. Looking at how Tom has handled our project, it seems that Tom was probably using this bricks-and-mortar shop and had no intention of using their services. To this day, almost ten years after, the leaks on the roof have not been fixed, and we feel Tom had simply washed his hands off the problem by passing us directly over to the roofer. The roofer was paid by Tom and we paid Tom. We lead busy lives and should not have to keep chasing a builder/roofer for a job uncompleted. Our advice is to stay away from Fountain Construction. There are honest and responsible builders around, and our experience with Tom shows otherwise.