Would appreciate some advice on the following.
My mum is 75 years old and needed some repair work doing to a garden wall. She has had problems in the past trying to get builders around to quote for small jobs because they don't seem to want to know. A friend of hers recommended someone so she got him around to give her a quote (verbal estimate). He told her the job would entail putting in some new blocks, shouldn't take anymore than a day and wouldn't cost anymore than £200. She felt this was reasonable so gave him the go ahead.
He did the job, took about three and a half hours and didn't use any blocks, she thought he was going to be here for the whole day. She got the bill and it said, "Labour only £200". We rang the guy and told him we thought his bill was a bit steep for the amount of work that had been done. He originally quoted £200, but took much less time and used less material than he thought. When asked why the bill was still £200, the guy said that there were two extra hours for ringing around to get materials (he's a builder, ringing around to get sand and cement?) and that he had to pay to get rid of the rubbish. We said that all these costs would already have been accounted for in the original estimate. We asked for an itemised bill.
The itemised bill has labour at £100 and materials and expenses at £100. He has charged us £20 for getting rid of rubbish (a bag or two which would have cost us £2 at the local tip but we weren't given that option); he has charged us for diesel on top of this; he seems to have marked up the cost of sand by 150%!!; charged us £13.50 for Feb Mix of which he will only have used a capful; and other things besides.
He is quite clearly ripping my mum off. What we need to know is, is my mum obliged to pay the bill because she accepted his verbal estimate (even though the job was much less than he thought and he is quite clearly overcharging on the materials)? We were thinking we would pay him £150 because that seems more reasonable.
