Another scaffold post

[nickw]

Yep seen a few on here and didn't want to resurrect an old one.

What a minefield of costs scaffold is, in relation to price and their how they cost and other things.

Had a "discussion" with them on how the cost needs to show labor separately for me to claim back, which approx amounts to %80 of costing. 

Does this seem expensive to anyone in the know.

Weekly site visit @75 a visit plus.

Any other hidden charges I need to watch out for?

 

 

scaffold quote.pdf

Edited March 5, 2019 by nickw

[Dreadnaught]

You might want to anonymise the attachment, just in case (remove address and email address). Public forum.

[Redoctober]

The quote, even with the weekly visit included appears pretty much near the mark to me. If it helps, I paid £5k for the set up in the attached photo and that was for a 10 week hire. However, it did include a front and back set up for a single storey stand alone car port.

 

[nickw]

Mine doesn't include weekly visit, if inc it's about £5100 plus mine is only 1 lift , looks to be about half your height, eaves are only at 3.2m ish. 

Just waiting on another few quotes. I figure I'll change a couple of things to get the cost down.

[Ferdinand]

misread

Edited March 5, 2019 by Ferdinand

[vivienz]

The labour part needs to be zero rated. You won't be able to reclaim VAT if it's charged, so ensure the scaffolder invoices you correctly.

 

Why do you need a weekly visit? I agreed in advance what sort of adjustments would be needed as the build progressed and these were included in the quote.

[epsilonGreedy]

On 05/03/2019 at 13:02, nickw said:

...

Had a "discussion" with them on how the cost needs to show labor separately for me to claim back, which approx amounts to %80 of costing. 

...

 

Very useful tip that, thank you.

[epsilonGreedy]

On 05/03/2019 at 13:02, nickw said:

Does this seem expensive to anyone in the know.

 

 

The overrun cost is good, the House Builder's Bible estimates this at 8% per week.

 

I visited another self builder recently and he was stung with a £5,000 overrun bill after months of zero communication and his assumption the scaffolding company were giving me a free overrun. He negotiated the bill down by half.

 

The base price looks a bit high for such a low eve height.

[Jeremy Harris]

I've just checked to see what was in our scaffolder's contract and they charged £1,350 for erection and the first 6 weeks hire, then charged £80/week for every week over.  In addition, they charged £120 for each of two lift changes we needed, part way through.

 

Interestingly they zero rated the whole bill, too, even though I didn't ask them to!

 

 

[Gone West]

We didn't have a written contract with our scaffolders. We had a fixed charge open ended arrangement which turned out to be fifteen months for £2560 which included three alterations. This was back in 2010/2011 though.

Edited April 27, 2019 by PeterStarck

[ToughButterCup]

On 05/03/2019 at 13:02, nickw said:

[...]

Any other hidden charges I need to watch out for?

[...]

 

Yes. Unforeseen delay.

One company we employed disappeared for five weeks: no notice - well that's unfair, they did tell us at 4.59 on Friday that they wouldn't be in the following week. Over a month later, they turned up.

 

Discussions about the £585 scaffolding charge for that month were interesting. It was the scaffolder (a really decent local bloke) who warned me about the company. The scaffolder had just had to remove the boarding from another job to force the company to pay his bill. It was quite spectacular -  I'd never seen a scaffolded two storey build without planks before: right in the middle of a local town.

 

[Ferdinand]

25 minutes ago, AnonymousBosch said:

The scaffolder had just had to remove the boarding from another job to force the company to pay his bill. It was quite spectacular -  I'd never seen a scaffolded two storey build without planks before: right in the middle of a local town.

 

That's quite funny.

 

Dismantling someone's scaffolding even slightly is the most effective way of stopping their build dead, 'cos it instantly invalidates their H&S environment. All it takes is removal of one brace.

 

Started doing that once when a bloke who had built his scaffolding on my garden without permission wouldn't talk to me about removing it (despite written notice), and was trying to create facts on the ground in violation of planning rules (things like abalanced flue straight over my garden, gutter overhand etc) to create a 'do not change it' balance in his favour when enforced upon, rather than rectify his design. PP had been passed and these items missed.

 

Scaffolder and the police were there in about 15 minutes.

 

That was quite a worrying one, as there had been after physical threats in the gloaming a couple of days before, and I needed quite a bit of  moral support.

 

My fault was not watching the rented property closely enough beforehand to catch it early. It was at nearly 1st flr level before I noticed, and he could have had a roof on it before the Council would have processed any paperwork - at which point forcing a change from an exposed to a hidden gutter becomes more complex.

 

Not something I would enjoy doing often.

F

Edited April 27, 2019 by Ferdinand

[Temp]

On 05/03/2019 at 13:02, nickw said:

Had a "discussion" with them on how the cost needs to show labor separately for me to claim back...

 

The labor should be zero rated to you (eg nothing to reclaim). The scaffolding hire is standard rated and can't be reclaimed.

 

https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/vat-construction/vconst02750

 

Zero-rating the construction of buildings: services excluded from zero rating: scaffolding, formwork and falsework

Where goods on hire require erection and dismantling (such as scaffolding, formwork and falsework) then the hire of the goods must be standard-rated but the supply of erection and dismantling is zero-rated when supplied in the course of the construction of a zero-rated building.