Definately get everything in writing, and then from our experience expect a lengthy fight trying to get them to honour. For the things you don’t have in writing it might be best to chalk those up to experience, having seen first hand what Charles Church spoken ‘word’ is worth.

We see quality of contruction and customer service as the biggest and continuing problems with Charles Church. We found poor customer service and low quality of workmanship to be a repreated theme throughout our years trying to persuade Charles Church to do the right thing and honour their warranty.

We can fully relate to the upset Charles Church quality problems and poor customer service have caused us to feel. How many years before the simple and complicated problems they left are fixed. From a simple leak to the major work they need to undertake, years have passed and progress is very tardy, if even existent.

The comments from Sarah Hamilton, a spokeswoman for the National House Building Council, are we found typical of the response NHBC gives, which makes it harder to pursue a claim because of the inability to acknowledge and get to the bottom of a problem. Follow this link to read more about a Redrow new home and the NHBC in this Telegraph Article on NHBC and Redrow Home.

We are still waiting for Charles Church (a division of Persimmon Group plc) to do the right thing. So far the NHBC has in our view been useless as well.

But the leaks are the smaller issues, the substandard construction of the floor is a much bigger concern to us, and still years after reporting the issues (and Charles Church continuing to build new homes with similar defects) we are still waiting for a proper investigation, and thus for the hope of a fix so we might one day be able to sell the home, which we originally thought would be a safe investment – how wrong we were.

Poor standards, failing customer service, lowest specification, Charles Church (the luxury arm within Persimmon Group plc, which also includes Persimmon New Homes) appears the norm, and even at the top of the company they appear to be all too aware, and all too keen to be seen to do nothing to resolve such issues. They’ve been caught out and now denial appears their chosen defence and tactic.

Much as Sigmund Freud defines denial as a defense mechanism, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.

The fact of so many customer complaints and so many unhappy customer experiences is the real problem with the Persimmon Group plc, and if they can’t fix a leak how can they ever fix all the other issues with the company and it’s products (new homes).

Self levelling laser levels are cheap and work very well. Albeit, it does mean getting down on the floor and using line of sight. These can be relatively easily calibrated, by opening the device and adding small pieces of sticky tape onto the swinging pendulum to level it. If you take two measure ments, in both directions of the same points, you can work out the devices error, and then recalibrate to get within 1mm.

You can also use a spirit level, which should be minimum of 2m.

However the best device by far is a water level, sometimes known as a pro level, and sometime (wrongly) called a manometer water level. These are very quick, very accurate and importantly do not need line of sight to measure. Hence they are unobtrusive being able to measure in and around small spaces, without disturbing furniture etc. The best source in the UK is Akwamasta Water Level, from Bevan Products. For only £66 delivered this is an excellent product, which makes measuring your floor levels very quick and easy. Indeed it’s the same device you can find NHBC engineers using to measure unlevel floors in new homes from the Persimmon Group plc.

The Akwamasta Water Level Floor Measurement Device has a cm scale, which can read measurement to 1mm. It has a 1m staff, which you could cut down if you need to measure under low shelfs. However for most open floor areas it is fine as it is.

As an unfortunate victim of Charles Church, for over 4 years now, I can safefly say the above statement couldn’t be further from the truth. Charles Church customer service is appalling, and I doubt they could cause more inconvenience, anxiety or stress if they deliberately tried (although I already think much of it is deliberate on their part).

4 years to fix a leaking toilet – not that it’s fixed yet – surely they couldn’t do any worse. Well actually they could, last visit (yet another repeat) when they came in to assess the toilet they flooded the bathroom with a cistern full of water from the toilets flush resevoir. Nice one Charles Church, great to see that same attention to detail consistent throughout the design, construction and customer care stages.

How we wish we had never seen the house. When will the nightmare end?