Howth

Plumbing Work CLC Interiors failed to fit either shower unit properly. Despite having fittings well in advance of when the job was supposed to start, the project manager never bothered to provide the plumber with them and the worker simply plowed ahead and started cutting pipes without knowing or caring what fittings were to be installed. PHOTO 13 - Bathroom 1 PHOTO 14 - Second Shower Unit Project Management CLC Interiors agreed to very tight delivery deadlines when we originally commissioned them. To be perfectly honest, I never expected to fully meet them but I did assume that we would have a door on the house on the day we were supposed to move in. Photo 14 below shows we didn't. The explanation we were given? The project manager had never realised we'd need one. Photos 15 and 16 were also taken that day. As should be clear the house was not even half ready. In fact, the other images I've posted were all taken nearly a month later and show a house that is still no where near complete. Plainly CLC Interiors failed to meet their schedule. There is no evidence of project progress being monitored or of the right resources been allocated to meet client commitments. Our experiences with the plumber and the electrician clearly demonstrate that they were not being properly supervised or briefed on what needed to be done. PHOTO 15: The Front Door PHOTO 16: Interior PHOTO 17: Bedroom

Plastering and Painting Their plastering and painting work was of a similar poor quality (please see the painting snag list for a breakdown of some of the problems we had). The photos below speak for themselves. PHOTO 8: Door Frame Cracks Every single doorframe they installed has cracks around it. PHOTO 9: Quality of Plastering Most of the plastering around the door frames is of a similar poor quality to that shown below. This is at the top of the stairs. Its impossible not to see going from the first to the second floor. PHOTO 10: Plastering Around Master Bedroom Door PHOTO 11: Painting & Plastering This is over the main entrance door. Again its difficult to believe that no one in any 'supervisory' role failed to notice this on their way in or out of the house. PHOTO 12: Painting Work The painting throughout the house was of a similar poor quality. I seriously doubt that an amateur painting a house for the first time would show this lack of attention to detail.

The story of photos 5, 6 and 7 encapsulates perfectly our experience of their workmanship and professional conduct. Photo 5 features a light we asked them to install in one of our rooms. Plainly it is not done properly. When we asked them to correct it, their solution was to tie it to the ceiling beam since the light 'wouldn't extend properly' (photo 6). Photo 7 features the same light after I fixed it. This took 30 seconds and involved going to the room next door and looking at a similar light that had been installed in that room. The electrician hadn't noticed at any point that he'd put it in upside down nor had the person who was supposed to be occupying a supervisory position done anything other than 'look at the fitting as if he knew what he was doing and tell me it couldnt be done. PHOTO 5 - Light installation PHOTO 6 - The First CLC Solution PHOTO 7 - Thirty Seconds to Fix

Apologies for not posting photos illustrating the quality of CLC's work any sooner. Below are a number of these along with comments that will provide a context/explanation for what you are looking at. I've also attached two of the snag lists which we gave to CLC Interiors at specific milestones in the project. Together should provide documentary evidence of the scale and nature of the problems we encountered. ELECTRICAL WORK CLC's electrical work was consistently shoddy and unprofessional (see the electrical snag list for documentary evidence of the scale of problems we had). Just about every plug and socket, for example, was installed incorrectly. They were usually misaligned (Photo 1) and/or were not properly fitted in the walls (photo 2). This lack of attention to detail and commitment to quality coupled with a lack of proper oversight and supervision were characteristic of every aspect of their work. Photo 3 shows details of the main lights in the dining room after they had tried their original mistake of using trunking to carry cabling across the roof. Photo 4 shows how they installed the lights on one of the stairs. There is no technical reasons why trunking should have been used over the main dining table nor do technical considerations explain why the trunking on the stair was not cut properly to properly hide the wires. They simply took the quickest, laziest option. PHOTO 1 - Incorrectly Aligned Light Fittings PHOTO 2 - Badly Installed Light Fittings PHOTO 3 - Dining Table Light - Poor Choice of Materials PHOTO 4 - Incorrectly measured trunking

Patsy_sg - my "better half" - has already given some of her thoughts on CLC Interiors. After our recent experiences, I think its time I gave mine. We originally engaged them as 'glorified project managers/contractors' rather than interior designers. If we'd be looking for the latter we would never have hired them but they appeared to have enough of the former and a little of the latter to meet our requirements. Our plan has always been to do a lot of the work on the house ourselves and in so doing turn it into a proper home rather than the glorified showroom that so many interiors designers want to build. Their job was to get the whole process started and, if they proved themselves to be what their sales person claimed they were, we would use them over the next 12-18 months for other work we want to do. We asked them to: Undertake some demolition and basic construction work (e.g. put in partition walls) Design & build a kitchen Install wardrobes, a console and dressing table in the master bedtoom Completely re-do two bathrooms Polish/restore/stain our marble, parquet and wood floors Paint the house Patsy has talked about their failure to meet the original deadlines they gave us and described the state of the place when we moved in so, for the moment, let's start with the positives. The kitchen is pretty much exactly what we wanted The quality of the carpentry work is excellent throughout And..... That's it, unless you call the 'barely adequate' something to be happy about but. The decorating work is basically complete but only after the house had to be repainted twice because the first attempt was so laughably shoddy. The floors are finally approaching acceptability but again that's only after three attempts on their part and the fact that we lowered our standards in relation to the parquet work because we've decided to replace it later in the year. Everything else is sub-standard, amateurish and completely unacceptable. The easy option would be to be blame the quality of the workers/subcontractors employed by CLC Interiors and it is true that a number of these are incredibly poor. Their electrician, for example, managed to incorrectly install over 90% of the new plug and light sockets in the house and his solution to not being able to get a wall light to hang properly was to tie it to a beam in the roof (I'll post pictures of this together with other examples of their work). If he’d gone and looked in the next-door room he would have seen what was wrong as he’d already installed one properly there. That he didn’t was down to laziness and a lack of thought. Everything about his work said that he took the easy option no matter what. Probably the best illustration is his use of casing to ‘disguise’ the wiring in our dining room light. There are no problems with hiding the cables in the ceiling (we’ve had two independent experts review all of their work who’ve confirmed this). He just didn’t bother thinking about what the end product looked like and did the quickest, dirtiest and easiest thing he could. I do not hold individual contractors responsible for this. Instead it is a direct consequence of CLC Interior’s lack of professionalism and inability to perform even basic project management. Our experiences tell us that: The work required to complete each part of the project was never properly estimated by the CLC Interior project manager. Contractors were not properly briefed on the tasks they were then asked to complete. Their work was not being supervised or monitored properly (if at all). They tended to demonstrate little interest/pride in their work (which speaks of a lack of proper management or motivation). Once problems start to occur, client communication largely focuses on avoiding incurring additional costs to CLC Interiors to resolve problems created by their own incompetency. Our experiences with two other suppliers highlight the shortcomings in their project management. We hired a company to install electric gates. The day before installation was to take place, their project manager came to the house and looked at what work needed to be done. The next morning 3 workman arrived who had been clearly briefed about the job. The project manager arrived midmorning to see how things were going and then came back at the end of the day to evaluate the work that had been completed and let us know what needed to be done. A similar thing happened with the company we hired to do do some wood work on the house. The project was properly scoped, the people who worked on it clearly knew what they were doing and in addition to managing his staff the project manager also kept us regularly updated on what was going on. CLC Interiors did none of these things. Our problems with our bathrooms illustrate this perfectly. The shower fittings have not installed properly. Even though they had the fittings prior to the work being carried out, the project manager never gave them to the plumber. He also never bothered to inform him what tiles were being installed or got him to liase with the tiler to ensure they were working together. The plumber then never thought to find out any of this for himself and just started working. No checks were made on his work and then once the problem was identified CLC Interiors devoted their time to doing the quickest, dirtiest and cheapest ‘almost fix’ to a problem of their own making. The same thing happened when cracks started to appear around the door frames and the partitions they had put up. The first time they were notified of the problem their sales person tried to look ‘knowledgeably’ at the cracks and told me it was down to the ‘house moving’. His solution was to send someone down to literally ‘plaster over the cracks’. He wasn’t a plasterer. He was the electricians assistant. The cracks had re-appeared before he even left. The next person down stuck a whole load of silicon into the cracks around one door, paid no attention to how it looked and headed off without doing the others or telling anyone what he had done. I could go on and on but the basic issue is this. CLC Interiors did not deliver on what they were hired to do. They struggled to achieve the barely adequate on some tasks and failed miserably in others. Where things turned out ok, that was down to the professional pride of the individual sub-contractors and had nothing to do with CLC Interiors project manager or sales executive. In all instances their professional conduct remained the same; laughably amateurish. Only hire them if your standards are low. They'll meet them.