If you rent a place with a leaky bathroom, you can always turn to your landlord for help. But home owners can’t threaten not to pay the rent. Brandon Hartley has been trying, and failing, to get someone to carry out household repairs on his own home for years.
A leaky shower is every homeowner’s nightmare. My partner and I discovered ours was having problems in March 2020 as the entire world was shutting down for the Covid crisis. The timing couldn’t have been worse.
Thankfully, it was a slow leak. We watched it slowly damage a shared wall with our laundry room as we spent months trying to find a contractor willing to brave both the pandemic and the perils of rebuilding a shower in our tiny 19th century house.
It was right around Christmas when two guys finally showed up with sledgehammers to get started. After a week of dust and noise, they ushered us into the bathroom to inspect their work. The grouting was a disaster, the shower’s floor felt rickety, and there were several other problems.
Anyone who has ever owned a home in the Netherlands has a similar story to share, if not several. Hiring contractors can often feel like invasive surgery, something best avoided unless absolutely necessary.
A colleague of ours once found herself arguing with a carpenter after he built her a porch that was too tall for an adjacent door. Once he was done, she couldn’t open it. Full scale home renovations can drag on for countless months and cost a fortune.
And then there’s the odd custom involving coffee.
Apparently, it’s an unspoken tradition to serve contractors coffee and keep it coming while they toil. Two friends of ours are slowly having their garden remodelled and have to be at their own workplaces so they can’t stay home to serve as baristas. They’ve resorted to putting a fully stocked Nespresso machine by their back door.
We did our best to keep our shower guys happy and well supplied with coffee but, for whatever reason, they still did lousy work. Maybe they didn’t like Douwe Egberts? They returned to ‘fix’ the mistakes they made but, once they were done, we knew our new shower had an expiration date.
Sure enough, we discovered a new leak in March and have since begun the arduous, months-long ordeal of finding someone to come out and deal with the shower a second time.
But there is no fail-safe way to ensure another contractor will actually get the job done and do it right. All too often, so much depends on word of mouth from others, simple luck, opinions on disparate websites like Werkspot, or whatever Google reviews churn up.
Too much work, too few workers
Of course, the Netherlands does have an ongoing labour crisis. Plumbers, electricians, and other handymen are often in short supply.
Worse yet, there are plenty of outright scam artists running about who know this all too well and are more than happy to prey upon desperate homeowners.
Contractors are also small business owners or freelancers who routinely have to make tough choices. That simple plumbing job might uncover a whole raft of other issues. If a project winds up taking longer than expected, that imperils the next one.
The scheduling alone must be a logistical nightmare, as is attracting skilled labourers to work alongside them. Just finding a parking spot for a van or truck in a crowded city centre on the average weekday would send most people scrambling to start a different career.
Do it yourself
But there’s always the DIY option. Our own experiences with taking on various home improvement projects could fill a second column. Feel free to ask our neighbours about the kitchen fan we installed a few years ago. It shakes the walls and is louder than a dozen screeching newborns.
As for the shower situation, a contractor came out two weeks ago and claims the entire thing will need to be rebuilt again. The guys back in 2020 didn’t install the floor properly and it’s created small holes in a wall that’s allowing water to leak through.
We’re still waiting for him to send over an estimate. Efforts to get second opinions have so far been for naught.
In the meantime, I used a €12 roll of ‘Power Tape’ to seal up the shower. If the label is to be believed, it’s waterproof and strong enough to prevent a crocodile from opening its jaws, but I’ll probably still need to reapply it every few weeks.
Given the way things are going, I should probably invest in enough rolls to get us through the next decade.