Don’t know if this is a fail on my part or someone else. Anyway, it’a fail.

Last week, I got a phone call from a company telling me that they will be installing something big in a house in our road and will be blocking it for a while (a conservatory), and they wanted to apologise to the people in the street by offering a discount on a quote. They actually said that the discount would be around £500. Normally, I’d send them packing, but we had been talking about replacing the front door, and I thought that this would probably cover most of the cost of that, or at the very least give a good enough discount. The quote, I was told, is goo for two years, so clearly no rush. So I agreed to a salesman calling round to talk to us about a new door.

Oh, good grief. They sent a child. He told us that he’d only just started, and he was very nervous. He took over an hour talking about the company, various payment options, and was flipping around an iPad with slides on it like there was no tomorrow. At one point, he ran through an example credit deal with a nominal figure of £10,000 to see if we liked the sound of it. I did ask at that point how he expected us to agree to something which was purely hypothetical. Show m,e real numbers and we’ll have a think. He said he had to explain all of this to start with. It seemed to me like an attempt to gauge how much we were willing to spend or could. I actually said that. No doors had been shown, no measurements taken. He also wanted us to give various problems with our current door marks out of ten. Things like drafts, security. It was fitted by the previous owner of the house, who bodged everything. The door frame doesn’t quite fit the door.

Eventually he did measure the door, was confused by the dimensions (it’s an old house, built to imperial measurements). he showed us some pictures of some rather uninspiring white uPVC doors. Some where ghastly, some looked like prison doors. None really fitted with the ideas I had for what we wanted, so we chose what I think was the best of a bad choice.

So some questions about the door? It had security locking, like our back door has. Spy hole? No. Security chain? No. Choice of colours? No - but we could, he supposed, paint it.

So the price came. Brace yourselves: around £3100. Now, there was this deal where we could agree to have photos taken, a board on the house and write a testimonial and they would drop it, but even the dropped price was really just under £2900.

This is for a white uPVC door. Nothing special, it’s fairly basic. We decided that no, we weren’t going ahead. So phone calls to the boss (who we could hear over the mobile and whose voice I recognised as the person I had spoken to before). At this point, we called it a day. It was 8pm, he was clearly out of his depth, either his manager was genuinely getting pissed off with him, or there was some kind of theatrics going on.

After he went, we found the invoice for the back door. £670.00 which we had put in a few years back.

Following day - a follow up call from someone else from the company. Did the appointment go OK, well, yes, but it did go on. Was there a problem with the product? Well, yes. I listed lack of colour choice, styles not really in keeping with the house, no security chain or spy hole. Apparently, we SHOULD have been shown composite doors which may have been more interesting and had a colour choice, and that security chains and spy holes were pretty much standard and he should have known that. Also he should have been accompanied by a manager as he was new, and any difficult to answer questions could have been answered, and we would have been shown more products.

So, no sale there. In fact, I’ve been speaking to another person I know who does proper wood work, and he said he could do a door we wanted for less, and out of real timber. So we may well speak to him next year when we have the cash together.

I may post a rant about doors in the ranting thread because I have other thoughts on the matter.

To contrast this with the people who we chose to remodel our chimney and fireplace and install a wood burning stove last year. He turned up, measured, did a survey of the chimney, and we talked about the house, what it had when it was built and what he felt would work in the room, and what I felt the house needed. Then he got a calculator out and worked out the price based on what we had discussed. He and his partner spent two days working very hard installing, plastering and rebuilding, and the total bill for that job came to less than this door would have. We have the fireplace we want.

Lesson learned here: deal with the people who actually do the work, not a salesman.

I remember when we got a new back door put in in my old house. Got some pillock in from Anglian for a quote. They wanted about £2k, although it would be lower if we bought it on credit... Didn't want to tell me the APR because it wasn't really relevant (in the end he admitted it was something like 34%). Said we'd think about it.
In the end go another local lot in who did it for less than £500 and the guy was sorry he could get it for less.

Double glazing, I'm not convinced I'd trust any of the big firms not to be just like Anglian.

It's standard proceedure for any double glazing company to over price. This is not something specific to Anglian. It's easy enough to find out how much windows and doors cost so you can get a rough idea of what you would pay.

I have decided that should I need to replace all of my double glazing - I would get all the main companies to turn up on the same day at the same time - let them all look over the house and then do a sealed bid - They would be allowed to call their Managers for any "special" discounts etc before. I would then open the envelopes when they had gone and chose the one I liked

Just typed you're instead of your

Oh the shame of it

I expect you won't see this reply as you'll have likely disconnected the internet and set fire to your computer/phone/tablet before "they" find you.

I expect you won't see this reply as you'll have likely disconnected the internet and set fire to your computer/phone/tablet before "they" find you.

Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

Just typed you're instead of your

Oh the shame of it

I didn't know their was a difference

Issued an extension that was still in use. Think it's the 2nd time I've done that in 4 years. Wasn't entirely my fault as the number wasn't logged in so I thought it was spare.

#fail