Time to get your painting and decorating done - before

the experts are booked up!

With the pick up in the economy, professional painters and decorators, who genuinely care about doing a good job for you, are telling their trade association that “the work is there and they are getting busier”.

As we have seen, people are keener to buy property now than a year ago and typically will spend around £8,000 in the first two years upgrading their homes. This means the demand for domestic professional painters and decorators – who belong to the Painting and Decorating Association is rising rapidly.

This is great news for cowboy tradespeople – the busier the professionals are the easier they find it to secure work from unsuspecting homeowners and landlords. But not so good news if you want a great job doing by someone you can trust.

 How to avoid a rogue trader

Lets face it, we’ve all had a bit of a go at painting and decorating ourselves. To be honest, I love doing it and have spent many days happily brandishing a paintbrush.

But these days I spend most of my time helping other people, and if I am going to trust anyone in my home, I want to make sure they take their job seriously.

Painters and decorators who are members of the association offer a much better service, and here’s how you can spot the good ones from the bad!

1. Visit the PDA’s website where they have a ‘find a member’ service.
2. Make sure anyone who works on your home has up to date liability insurance and legal cover should the job go wrong, this gives you peace of mind that you will be compensated fairly.
3. Always ask for a detailed quote in writing. Ask for labour and materials to be quoted separately.
4. Check which paints they are going to use – have you had a bad experience with it before and would prefer they used something else?
5. View an absence of VAT charges as ‘bad news’. Only successful, honest tradesmen and companies charge VAT, a great way of avoiding a rogue is if they ask for cash – run!

In addition is there a clear ‘code of practice’? So if something does go wrong and for whatever reason you can’t solve it yourselves, rather than resort to expensive legal action, members of organisations who belong to the PDA have an independent, third party complaints procedure

So, need painting and decorating jobs done this year – get them booked in early to avoid the rogues!

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• How to choose a painter and decorator checklist
• How to avoid rogue traders checklist
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