DpEndofShalo

Its a she, and an accountant and doesnt mind paying in cash or dealing with Mr Smelly. Also a southern belle that loves Wales, lives in England with a Polish guy and a English Cocker Spaniel and a Turkish cat bringing up the rear. Its the United Nations at my house. I am sure that my grammar could use a brush up I am afterall from the colony

Well, I have partaken of whats on offer at the Mr Smelly Bistro also known as Kizzi's. Lunch on Saturday and breakfast on Monday. Try as I might, I could find nothing to complain about and the fact that I went back a second time speaks for itself. Now as to Mr Smelly himself, well, surprisingly he did not smell except for the slight whiff of bacon on Sunday morning. When it came time to pay, we were relieved of our cash with due care and attention and a smile. I must remark on his lovely staff member. The lady with the dark hair...... what an absolute treat she is Be kind to her Smelly, she makes the place sparkle Tom and Alison

As an accountant, I would advise him to do as such I will be trying him out on Saturday, I will report my findings

Should I be afraid ? ha ha

Heres to the start of a beautiful friendship

How about lunch Saturday? I do not really drink but having you prepare some food will save me having to cook. I will be all over that on a regular basis. Open year round?

HEY NEIGHBOR! We are taking up a slot there for the coming year. Come say hi to us this weekend if you are aboard. We are coming down for Saturday and Sunday. Anything I should know about the mooring ? I must warn you, I make truly awful tea. Im a yank, born and raised and as you probably know, we like our tea ice cold

In the week, Mon - Fri, we see each other an hour or so a day before its lights out to do it all over the next day. I hope that this will not be our lifestyle for more than a few years and if the right job came along closer to home, I know Tom would jump on it. I would personally like to see him take a pay cut and work closer to home but I also would never ask him to take a job and spend hours every day doing something he hated. Weekends are our time and I enjoy 100% of his attention for two full days. When we take to our boat, its our little haven and now that we have her back, she will be in use every week again

Well folks, here she is, done and dusted. We did not end up going with the painter at our mooring. We went with Oxon http://www.oxonboatpainting.co.uk/ Can't state enough what a great job they did. The price was very fair and the customer service excellent. They really saved us from disaster. Very pleased. Ive enclosed a before picture so you can see her former leisure wear. Once again big thank you to all of you. You were wonderful when we really needed it. Tom and Alison 21429682_1253986828064624_4779372833132249088_n.mp4

It went ..... well, very well. We arrived on site to collect the boat and there were problems but nothing we could not sort out. We told him we were not angry with him as he had agreed to help us get our boat in a condition to move and refunded our money in part. He is a nice chap, just not so good at time keeping. Problems.... well.... they took her right back to the metal which is exaclty what we asked..... but many areas in hard to reach places were left untouched. Our round windows... porthole windows... all 6 of them were put back in with this horrid black stuff that they were not very careful with, the new painter was appalled. We found deep cuts in the metal in a few places and they clipped the wire for one of the outside lights so short that it has receded back through the hole They took no care whatsoever when it came to the inside of the boat. I spent the first 3 hours cleaning up all the paintchips dust and dirt. Equipment loaded onto our boat did not belong to us. Items that did belong to us, we had to look for ourselves amongst the mess. She has been delivered to the new painter with a bit of rust from having to run her in the rain but we feel so much better that she is where she is now. The refund that we received was for everything we paid minus the cost of the paint which we took away with us. So full refund and paint at trade prices wasnt bad. This could have been a lot worse but you know when you are in the middle of the disaster yourself......its hard to think positively. You all have been fantastic...... Someone even messaged me to go to the painter we went with in the end. If we were in the pub, it would be pints all round.... And, if you see me on the cut.... just say how about that pint.... and we shall definately go for one. THANK YOU from myself, Tom, and Captain Cery..... (Cery being the 8 month old spaniel that is in charge ) Alison

GOOD NEWS The painter has responded. He explained his situation and gave us a list of options and one of those options was a full refund and picking up the boat on Saturday. We have chosen to pick up the boat. I believe I stated many times in this post that on a personal level, I like this man. I do not think that his actions toward us while diabolical on the whole were intended as such. In my response to him I noted that my opinion of him personally has not been affected by this professional fiasco. It has caused me quite a few sleepless nights to have to push things to the extreme that we did in order to get a result. I would have loved it if he could have picked the job up and got it done finally but from his email this was not a likely prospect. I am very well versed in consumer and contract law. I was fully aware of the consequences should things go wrong. We purchased a home in 2015 and had multiple contractors in for the refurbishment and my standard practice for having any work performed that will cost over £1000 is to log on to companies house, see when the last accounts were filed and what those accounts have to say about the business. I also ask for insurance details. Part of my reason for choosing this particular person to paint our boat was that I was reasonably certain that he was not in financial hardship and his insurance details checked out. As this is part of my job and I have access to the information, not looking into these things beforehand leaves me more vulnerable than needs be. Judging from the other side of his canal business I was very certain that it would not end up with me losing £1900 if things went wrong. And as stated, I do not think this man is in any way dodgy. I think he bit off more than he could chew and didnt walk away when he could have because he truly wanted to turn it around. He is simply not able and simply loathe to tell us that. On a more personal level, that boat is not simply wood and metal clanged together so we can la tee da down the canal. My partner commutes Oxford to London every working day and we see each other for perhaps an hour a day. When we are on the boat, we leave work and the world behind and focus on one another. We went every weekend in the winter and it has made a significant difference to the quality of our lives together. Investing in the boat is investing in us. She needed a new paint job..... and she will finally get one.... a little later than planned. Crossing my fingers for Saturday. Keep us in your thoughts and if you are anywhere on the stratford/oxford canals and see a crazy looking boat, by all means wave...... Thank you all again so much for your advice. As I mentioned before, this is an invaluable resource for people that love boating..... but know very little about some aspects of it. Alison

I came to the UK 20 years ago May 29th from a country where customer service is very different. It took a while not to bring my foreign mentality into a situation when I found myself having problems. It is not the case that customer service is so bad here and great there, the difference is in the fact that you seem to encounter many more small businesses who are run on a much smaller scale than corporations. There has to be a different level of give and take when dealing with small firms. The "Customer is Always Right" mentality could drive a small business into the ground if the business owner simply rolled over every time a complaint is made. The thing about this entire situation that gets straight up my nose is the fact that we are frantic trying to find out what is going on and have reached out to this man many many times before it has come to this level of problem and he can not even be bothered to reply to us in any way. It makes us think of things as so much worse than they probably are. We have even given him a couple of chances to wash his hands clean of the entire situation and even that is ignored. I simply do not understand it. Truth be told, Id still sit down and have a pint with this man, I just would not entrust him to undertake work on my boat. He has been in business over 25 years and I have not heard a negative word about him which makes me think there is something else going on and you know, we would have worked with him to the bitter end if dealt with fairly and honestly. And unfortunately, I can not empathize with a situaiton I know nothing about. But, at this stage, its hard to be very understanding at all especially when we have brought up the fact many times that the lack of communication is our chief complaint. I am glad we are going to take her back on Saturday but boy I am dreading what condition i may find her in. Fingers crossed.

Update on current situation: We have informed the painter that we will be arriving on Saturday to collect the boat and requested a full refund. We have contacted the painter using the following methods 1. Email 2. Telephone where we left message 3. Text message 4. Facebook messenger message 5. Registered letter sent via Royal Mail signed for. Complete communication black out from their side. This is his standard response when things are not going as planned or he knows that we will not be happy. The stress and anxiety caused by this are heightened by a factor of 1000 when we are treated like this. I think I have covered all of the bases but if anyone can think of anything else I should do, I would be so grateful to hear it. Thank you for the time you take responding to me, we feel lost at times in all of this because we have never experienced anything like this in terms of a service provider. It really is so ridiculous at this point that its hard to believe. Thank you Alison

I hope you will post pictures when complete Im glad you posted this because I would hate for someone like me to come along and read this thread and think that this is typical. From talking extensively to people, this is very much out of the ordinary. What I would advise is as someone previously posted, watching the job a little more closely from the start by perhaps visiting the yard or asking for updates via photograph. We would have known much sooner that every deadline he was promising was impossible.

That is absolutely what has taken place here because to be fair to the man, he is someone that you would spend hours talking to. His reputation with his other canal based business is second to none. We have stuck it out this long because he is actually a kind person and we felt like he wanted to do as promised, he just can't. But its now at a point where he needs to just own his error in taking the job on and we cut ties. Ive hate forcing his hand every step of the way but as demonstrated by my naked boat, it was the right thing to do and now I can comfortably extract myself from the disaster having given every consideration on our side and getting nothing in return. If it goes ugly for you and you need help making it right in a legal sense, I would be glad to advise. The law is best left out of these situations if at all possible but sometimes its the only way forward.