A FAMILY claims to have been left living on a building site for months after allegedly paying a firm £44,000 for an extension – only for them to go bust two weeks after starting work.
Alan Street and his partner Joanna Hart say they’re stuck living with a wooden shell that should form the base of their extension outside the back of their home.
But despite shelling out £44,000 to an Essex-based building firm, IT consultant Alan, 36, and his 30-year-old partner Joanna have been left with another £20,000 bill if they want to get others to complete the work at their terraced home in Hornchurch, East London.
Hudson Garden Rooms started building the modern extension in May, but they disappeared after just a month of construction.
IT consultant Alan said: “They totally disappeared apart from a couple of emails saying ‘yes, we will be back to complete the job on July 1’, but they never showed up.”
“The structure sits on piles.
“We will need to take everything down, get the piles tested and pay an engineer for a report to make it legal.
“It will cost at least £1,000 and that’s before we start talking about the building, which will take another £15,000 to £20,0000 to finish.”
We will need to take everything down, get the piles tested and pay an engineer for a report to make it legal
Alan Street
Alan says he now has an empty timber shell in his back garden and faces a bill of more than £20,000 to fix the mess.
He said: “I’m not proud of what happened, but I’m not ashamed either. I did everything I could have done.
“I checked the company’s financial standing and as far as I could see, it was all fine.
“Lots of people have had their extensions knocked down completely because planners hadn’t approved them.
“Some people have even had to remortgage after losing fortunes of up to £90,000.”
Hudson Garden Rooms, run by couple Chris and Sophie Escrader, went into liquidation debts of £400,000 last October – but builders continued the previous firm’s projects under a new guise – Hudson Living.
Now customers have complained they have been unable to get hold of the owners for weeks since they responded to a few emails in June.
Alan said: “The owner told me he had changed the company’s to Hudson Living because they now did home extensions too.”
Alan said he contacted Hudson Garden Rooms in October after seeing their adverts on Facebook, and paid them £44,000 in December.
He said he then received a blanket email on June 3 saying works were paused due to refinancing and would resume on July 1.
Alan said he has reported the matter to Action Fraud.
A spokeswoman said: “If a company has been reported to us we would pass the matter on to police for investigation.”
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