How not to talk to builders

It’s week eight of the installation of a cheap Ikea kitchen in my flat, and an Albanian builder is slumped in an armchair in my sitting room. He’s shielding his face with his hand, Princess Diana-style, to hide the fact that he’s weeping.

My kitchen sink drama began when I rang a firm of local builders and they sent round a chap called Dave with a twinkle in his eye and a plan to rip off his employers. ‘Here’s what you do,’ he said. ‘Hire me for a day, tell the boss you’ve changed your mind and sack me. Then I’ll come round after work, charge you half the original quote and we’re all laughing.’ I did sack him – but after five weeks, not one day, and there were no merry chuckles when I screamed down the phone that I wanted him out of my life, for ever.

At first I thought I’d struck gold. You always do. Dave was in his mid-sixties with tight grey curls and an eye for the ladies. He’d been through four divorces and was back with ex-wife number one, whom he’d married in 1977. (‘Always fancied her, still do.’) He sounded like Bob Hoskins and, like Bob in those old BT ads, he thought it was good to talk. Especially when I was paying.

He’d explain, in meticulous detail, how he was going to shave off some formica to make room for the washing machine. Then he’d disappear into the kitchen for 20 minutes and I’d wait for an anguished cry of ‘Farck!’ before he broke the news that ‘they delivered the wrong one’. It seemed rude to point out that he’d ordered the wrong one. Several wrong ones, in fact, because every time he borrowed my laptop to visit the Ikea website he complained that he’d lost ‘me gogs’ – the reading glasses that enabled him to distinguish between 50cm and 80cm.