Kevin W

I was distracted today and forgot to apply my nectar card on a fairly large shopping trip. I went to the customer service and they applied my points but were unable to refund the nectar-related discounts - these are now common in the large shops and can influence purchasing decisions and decisions about where to shop. They said they could cancel all my purchases and the items could be rescanned. I didn't have time for that and there was a queue at customer service so it wasn't going to be a good experience for the rest of the customers. I'd guess the discounts were about 10% of the value of my shopping.

I had some time later in the day and filled in the online contact form from home. To my surprise within half an hour I got an email mentioning I'd receive a gift card for a touch more than my lost discount estimate.

I've been shopping a lot at Sainsbury's in the six years as the prices became noticeably better than the Tesco Metros near me as food inflation ramped up. Plus their small convenience stores often have good discounts and the meal deals are good value for a light lunch.

One negative is the major redevelopment of the large store near me. The use of land there is a truly wasteful disgrace. I don't blame them for that, the council should never have allowed (or encouraged?) it.

One of my previous reviews for this firm was removed as they filed a complaint about it containing profane language. Oddly it took them several months to complain despite responding to it soon after it was published. Ironically, my review was complaining about our property manager's decision to abandon graffiti removal (against local council recommendations) which has resulted in the area around our communal front door being covered in disgusting scrawl including some profane language which every resident and visitor gets to see here! I wrote a letter to TrustPilot to appeal it and they reinstated it immediately as it didn't actually breach their rules at all. I have seen this tactic used once (in 14 years) on TripAdvisor and it's not a good sign when a firm plays games and tries every trick available to them to remove legitimate reviews they don't like. If they want reviews with a high score then providing a good service is a simple way to achieve that. I wonder if the "one bad apple" excuse will be wheeled out for this action.

In terms of service, our lift was broken for at least five weeks again recently leaving me to carry my suitcase down and up the stairs for a trip abroad. It took them about four weeks to acknowledge this after the first lift engineer (that I was aware of) visited. The lift was exhibiting the same symptoms as it had done previously. On the first visit from the engineer a clear sign on the lift announcing it wasn't working and had been attended to would have been useful. The only communication we received was a slightly odd request not to tamper with the lift from our property manager four weeks later. I would have preferred a more expedient explanation for why it keeps breaking and what was being done to ensure that it doesn't break in the same way again. I didn't observe any substantial work being done on it so I don't know why it took five weeks.

Going back to the graffiti, an oddity here is two of our buildings are almost graffiti free around the front doors with the other two being covered in it. Perhaps leaseholders or residents or one of the businesses that operates here are taking this matter into their own hands to avoid the terrible appearance.

It's less noticeable in summer but our communal hallway lighting (9 broken, one has cover missing exposing wiring) still doesn't work leaving the dim green glow of the emergency lighting to illuminate the corridors. This has been discussed with them multiple times and a neighbour reported this was going to all be checked back in February, it clearly wasn't or was ignored after that check.

I noticed today the "temporary" lock that's been used for one of our vehicle gates has gone missing. This would explain the miscreants I saw hovering around a car in the car park in the last few days. It might also explain the damage to a cast iron inspection/manhole cover inside the gate. I've just reported this.

Those gates are due to be replaced. I would have liked monthly reports on this project but it's run on and on and I've no idea what the status is. The demand for funding for this appeared in late April. Ten weeks later and they've told us nothing about when this will happen. I did notice a huge lump of faeces probably not from an animal outside a gas cupboard last week which is the sort of thing that's been happening with our current recessed gates.

I normally get stubborn, combative responses to my reviews for this firm often with factoids and strange uninformed claims that I've never contacted the property manager. An organised firm would consult its CRM system before accusing me of this. I've written six letters to them including a section 20 response, I'd estimate (if they had a proper ticketing system I wouldn't have to guess here) I've filed about ten maintenance requests and my outbox shows 22 emails including this firm's email domain (this would include forwarding the aforementioned six letters).

I had to make a payment recently to redeem a mortgage. I had discussed this with the Barclays Mortgage team about six weeks ago and they had recommended using a convenient feature on the web site for this.

I logged in and eventually found the feature and tried to do a two stage payment which apparently is the technique that's required to use that feature. Didn't work, produced an error about a daily limit. I can understand applying a daily limit as a general risk feature but I wasn't paying my new friend I'd recently met from North Korea on Telegram, I was paying Barclays themselves. The web site suggested calling Barclays.

I called Barclays and went through the usual plethora of options designed to stop you talking to someone. When I finally managed to speak to someone I was told that they couldn't do this over the phone and it had to be done in branch. Given the UK retail banks have been voraciously closing their branches over the last two decades this could be very inconvenient for some people. If you can't get to a branch that day (at short notice) you're going to end up defaulting on the mortgage and I imagine that means a tedious exercise afterwards to clean up your credit history.

I visited a branch and the service was reasonably efficient. Comically, it was still treated as a payment to an arbitrary account. The member of staff mentioned a 25 pound fee would normally apply but that would be waived. I should have been charging Barclays a fee for wasting an hour and a half of my time with this fiasco.

I looked back at the letters from the Mortgage department and there was no mention/warning of this.
None of this really surprises me. UK retail banking from the old incumbents is clunky and the products are never designed for the customer. I'm only with Barclays because they acquired a lender with more innovative mortgages. I had also asked previously if I could extend my mortgage as it would have dealt with a government-caused minor issue with my financial
planning - they couldn't do that, they just wanted to sell me more products, i.e. more unjustified, high fees. It would be nice to see an industry that is less sales-focussed and more customer-focussed but I can't see it happening.

I booked a tour in the evening for the next day while I was on holiday. Shortly after doing that the tour operator called me and told me the tour wasn't actually running despite being listed and I needed to cancel it.

It was easy to find the cancel option but the first minor issue is the cancellation form on the (tablet presentation) website has a drop down box for this case of the tour operator asking the customer to cancel it but it also insists on another box being filled in with the a reason and there isn't an appropriate entry for this scenario. It feels like there should just be one list here in the user interface.

The more important issue is you don't automatically get a refund for this scenario because it's within 24 hours although of course you've paid for zero service! The charge remains on your credit card and it's only when/if you carefully go though your statement that you find there's no refund. I've had to call Viator's customer support line (twice, first call went into inky void) to request a refund. The polite lady is now looking into this as the the tour supplier is currently unavailable (it's late in their time zone).

Perhaps this is a niche case but I can't see why the responsibility for this type of refund is dumped on the customer customer.

I sent a small parcel to another country just before Christmas and it almost got there but then the postal service at the other end seemed to forget to attempt a redelivery and "lost" the parcel. They were still looking for it when it was returned to me about 6 weeks later, clearly they got confused about a simple parcel delivery!

Royal Mail don't have a specific claim for this. I filed a claim last week on their web site. To me this is a very simple case of: I gave you a parcel to deliver and you didn't do it. I just endured over an hour in a queue on the phone to discuss this with them. I was asked for evidence of postage - that's bizarre given their own tracking system has a full history of sending it thousands of miles around the world and back - I think this is just because of the category of claim rather than an abusive technique to reduce legitimate claims.

I was told this can take up to 90 days, again bizarre as nothing's going to change over that period. The person I spoke to assured me she had added a note to the claim to explain that I had been forced to claim under the wrong category. Fingers crossed...

I logged into the BA Executive Club or whatever they have pointlessly rebranded it to for an online check-in (using a browser on a desktop computer). I've never seen the benefit for me as a traveller with hold luggage in performing online check-in but this seems to be the modern way.

I noticed on my booking a single line of text about needing to inform BA if you are travelling with skis or snowboards. I've been travelling with oversize luggage at this time of year for 15+ years and I have never noticed this before. You don't get this message if you check-in using just a booking reference. This is a surreal way to try to gather more information about luggage. Do BA expect everyone to login to this system to do this? This information is trivial to gather when you buy a ticket which I did many months ago via the same website. I have no idea what the BA app does, I'm not installing that for infrequent travel.

The actual addition is achieved via the chat feature on the website. That chat is the usual automated nonsense and then if you're fortunate and it works it will connect you to a person. I then got asked the weight and dimensions of my oversize bag - not easy to get if you're at work and the weight can only be estimated if you haven't yet packed it. Then a whole load of extra information used to "verify" me. And this is all from a chat session which was launched from a website I was logged into. There is a pathetic lack of integration here between the website and chat here. This puts customer data at unnecessary risk.

The actual check-in did nothing for about 3 minutes with "Please wait while processing the data" on screen. I gave up on that and tried again and it worked second time around.

What should have been a 2 minute activity was more like 15 minutes and included the inefficient use of someone working for BA to do some sort of manual update to my booking. This is what I would expect from an airline that started a year ago and was working on refining its processes. It's not what I want from a "full service" airline with almost a century of service if you include BOAC.

I had hired a car in France and everything went okay until I checked my credit card afterwards. There was a charge of a few pounds on it. I had a look at the email from Budget and it did mention this but it wasn't clear why the charge was there. I had paid for this in advance from rentalcars.com and wasn't sure who was to blame for this.

After the festive period I called them to see what is was. They do have a callback service but I left the call running. They estimated 30 minutes but it took an unbelievable 90 minutes to get through to someone. The person I spoke to wasn't sure what the charge was for either but her best guess was it was because I had walked into the office 15 minutes before my reservation time and the system had automatically charged me for an extra 15 minutes of rental. My actual rental time was still below the allotted 24 hours.

I shouldn't have to waste my time following up this sort of nonsense from a company. The charge should have been clear as to what it is for. The person in the office should have either waived this or suggested I wait. The automation should have some checks in place to either avoid stupid small charges or only apply them if they are approved by a human - these sort of things irritate individual customers. It's possible this sort of charging is in place as corporate customers would just ignore it and it's an easy way to boost profits.

The office is about ten minutes walk from the car park to add to the weirdness of this event and adding a toilet break and finding the car it's going to be 15+ minutes.

Budget in Lille at the Eurostar terminal are now using the Westfield car park. This is the typical compact underground car park with the normal risks of tight spaces and lots of concrete to avoid. Two things to be extra careful of here are the large number of blind junctions with stop signs and the low ceiling in certain places. For the latter I think some boot lids might scrape the ceiling as you open it to put luggage in.

Budget do have good pricing at the moment for short rentals. I normally use Enterprise as they have a better damage policy but I have my own excess insurance policy now and the pricing means Budget can be tempting.

Our lift has now been broken for three months. I had to carry my heavy suitcase up and down the stairs last week. The cleaner reported this probably on 25th September which was when they visited according to a (now-removed) sign-in sheet. I reported it on 10th November via the website and did try a second report but I think that must have errored as, looking back, I never got an email acknowledgement. A fellow leaseholder had to then email them twice recently to provoke a response mentioning the need of "replacement to the autodialer". Whenever I've looked at the lift for the last 3 months it's been sitting 10cm below the floor level with the door open so it seems unlikely that the autodialer is the only problem with it.

As always a subset of leaseholders and I are getting updates from other leaseholders rather than our property manager. On Friday I saw an email stating the work was complete on all of the communal lighting in three of the buildings including mine. Given my corridor and the one above it is pitch black at night due to the lights and emergency lights (for safety) not being operational this is clearly incorrect. The non-functioning emergency light on my corridor also has a fist size hole in the plasterboard near it, not the neatest of jobs.

I see a reply on my previous review. I certainly do not agree with the stance that our property manager has taken on graffiti due to the influence of a handful of leaseholders. I have not seen any evidence that a true majority of leaseholders support this and I think given the cleanliness of one particular area that a business here is cleaning some of it off themselves as an understandable attempt to try to preserve their image. To avoid any confusion, this is not street art, it's talentless taggers and a few curious written statements - the sort of thing you get on any neglected building in a big city. If my godson visits then at eye level he gets to read "Someone is a bully b****" and "James is a c***" which is written near our communal front door. I'm not sure who James is, but this doesn't seem very civilised to me. Looking at the council website they agree, mentioning it's criminal activity, it can reduce property value, depress economic development and create an increased fear of crime.

The previous reply also mentioned that the development had "had very little money". This is from the property manager who has set the budgets for the last 4 years (46 months)! And why do they think leaseholders don't want to pay (extra) to not live in a slum? I can't imagine any of my friends who own properties waiting 4 years to deal with an issue. I also don't know why more pressure wasn't applied to the council as councils are supposed to make a decision in 8 weeks for a simple application not 54 weeks. Our property manager made no attempt to coordinate support for this. I wrote to a local school asking for support and discussed the matter with a councillor. If we had a good property manager then I think this project would have been completed in 6-8 months but instead we're looking at 4+ years with completion sometime in 2026.

One of our other buildings has had an estate agents sign on it for a long time. This is despite a sign on our buildings saying there are not permitted. It's mildly amusing that another obvious external sign provides the contact details of the previous property manager. Eventually that might be completely covered in graffiti, so perhaps that's viewed as okay.

In short, unless as a leaseholder you are directly and actively micro-managing this firm to meet your requirements then you are unlikely to receive anything approaching a reasonable, efficient, expedient service.

Posti in Finland now tops my list as the worst postal service in Europe from the point of view of sending letters and parcels from the UK.

I have to allow three weeks for any letter for it to stand a realistic chance of arriving on time. For parcels (gifts) the recipient might get charged for something or might not. I've had a parcel returned with a sticker on it where the sticker is supposed to explain the reason for the return but none of the boxes had been ticked. Every time I send something it feels like I'm rolling the dice on when and whether it will arrive and if there will be some random charge.

I ordered a gift in the UK for my friend in Denmark. I like to send gifts myself so I can wrap them and add a note but it was more efficient to send it direct from the small retailer who normally sells on Etsy.

The gift with a value of 20-30 pounds has now incurred a 160 DKK fee (18.75 GBP) and a 42 DKK charge for "income duty" (4.92 GBP). I understand that even though it's a gift (by proxy) the retailer cannot mark it as one but the fee here is outrageous, grossly disproportionate and appears to just be a revenue generating exercise. I'm starting to think this is part of the Danish mindset of fines and large fees. I think in this case we're going to let the item be returned and then I'll bring one over in person next year to avoid all any more nonsense and rewarding this ransom-like behaviour.

PostNord is not alone in terms of high fees, strange behaviour and charging VAT when there's no value addition. This seems to be common among European postal services and more noticeable now the UK has left the EU. I have had items returned by the Finnish and French services with no reason stated.

If you are going to buy anything and send it to Denmark I'd recommend using a retailer who is experienced in dealing with European postal services and prepaying any charges.

I found Deco Floors on the list of retailers for Kahrs after some water had damaged a section of my flooring. I visited the compact showroom in Farringdon which I'd say is essential if you are not familiar with a floor - there are lots of made-up samples to let you see how they look assembled. I needed a quote for some insurance work and we arranged a morning visit a day or two later to measure up for a free quote.

The measurement also allowed a discussion on how to join to my existing floor which flowed into another room. Kahrs still sell a 15mm product with identical dimensions but the locking system has changed. Allain spotted the finish was different on the new floor, oil vs a satin varnish, something I had not realised. I had to chase the quote up a week or two later as it hadn't appeared.

After some painting was done and the tedious process of dealing with a lethargic insurer we agreed a convenient date for the work. Ivan fitted the floor. He was very organised, methodical and is clearly very skilled at this. On day one it was removal, preparatory work and bonding the first board to my existing floor, day two was the bulk of the work, about a day and 2/3 work in total. The old floor was a bit warped by the water damage but one surprise to me during the removal was the boards had been weakened by the soaking and while it wasn't particularly visible they were clearly affected by mould. I opened all the windows during the removal phase.

Deco Floors were a touch more expensive than my other quote but as the most credible firm I went with them. I'm very happy with the work and would thoroughly recommend them.

Note: the web site is http only which may provoke a warning in the browser, it needs an update to turn it into a modern https site.

This is another company that I discovered from a BBC News story about their designs being stolen and sold on Temu.

I ordered from Christmas cards from their Etsy shop and they arrived quickly and were very neatly wrapped. The cards look great.

In three months Principle Estate Management will have been "managing" our property for 4 years. Our building is currently covered in graffiti, one of our bin stores has been sealed up for about a year, we have bins in the open attracting vermin and getting rained on, the lift has been broken in my building for over a month and a lot of the communal lights don't work. The paint pots their contractor left under our stairs yonks ago are still there despite the alleged regular inspections of the building and my email. They send us regular notices telling us not to place items there, of course.

I did a survey last night of the 19 communal lights, 7 don't work, 2 slowly flicker, the rest are okay. Today I noticed some come on during the day despite them having sensors for motion triggered night time control.

There was a meeting on Monday between the property manager and leaseholders which I couldn't attend. It's now the end of the office day on Friday and there's no minutes from the property manager.

I get more information from other leaseholders than the property manager but these updates do not go to all leaseholders. I did find out a few months ago they are consulting a surveyor to install some anti-bird spikes on 6 metal struts where pigeons have been lingering for a few years crapping over the entrance and intercom buttons. I'm surprised that job needs a surveyor and even more surprised by them contemplating using a cherry picker to do the work. It's difficult to describe but there's railings in the way all up the (four storey) building which prevent close access. A ladder is probably safer because it would be near the struts and the ladder would be contained by the railings. There's more talk than action on this trivial project so the pigeons continue their unpleasant decorating activity.

One of their staff mentioned in an email "every single floor in every building had what seemed to be brown mud marks throughout". That's the grey with brown patches plastic floor they installed and not mud. That's a good indication of how familiar they are with our property.

Since before they took over the management of our property there's been anti-social behaviour, drug-taking, vandalism and other criminal behaviour just outside our vehicle gates. It's 10-11 months since they filed a planning permission application on our behalf to relocate our vehicle gates. Nothing has happened here and the council hasn't even published a decision. There's clearly joint responsibility here with a disinterested council but I would expect an experienced property manager to stay on top of this and know how to navigate the system and negotiate firmly with any council departments that puts their own unrelated micro-agendas above the safety of the people who live in the area. I called the council last week and couldn't get a full update but they did mention there were 30 responses and all 30 were supportive - go figure.

The only online offering is a clumsy reporting system. There's no visibility of previously reported issues by other leaseholders and no feature AFAIK for residents who are not leaseholders to report issues directly to the property manager. I suspect this could be a small factor contributing to the ineffectual communication on minor issues.

Like many people I've been paying for buildings insurance for decades without a claim. A new washing machine was installed in the flat above mine and the deluge of dirty water presented me with my first claim. The policy is with Zurich but for some reason the broker, AJG, handle some of the claims.

I had to act quickly and called them up after the leak happened as I was going to be away for two weeks. That polite phone call went reasonably well but when I got back I was surprised they had no claim form to fill in. I'd expect something paper or electronic to give structure to a claim. Instead they just asked for things in email which could easily turn into a ping-pong session. I assumed this was a tiny firm with no IT using the most primitive form of technology (just email) but was surprised to find Gallagher are a huge company.

It took me a long time to find some tradesmen but I eventually submitted a very detailed letter which included all the information/photographs they had previously asked for and gave some structure to the claim. I thought if they aren't going to do that then I will.

They only told me they could arrange and pay for all the work directly after I had got quotes. I doubt I'd want to use their contractors but that fact could have been divulged when I first spoke to them.

The main issue is they are slow to respond to anything via email. I'd estimate a 7 day response time on average. They have no interest in paying promptly when a customer has already paid and may need the money to pay a hefty credit card bill. I had to call them for the last payment which was "waiting for authorisation".

I thought they would visit to assess the claim but they didn't. They did reject one part of my claim on the basis it was consequential losses. This was for the public transport travel for a friend who kindly attended to the dehumidifier for a few days while I was away. I'm not sure if that's actually true and I wasn't going to argue over 29 pounds on a 3.8k claim but but it seemed very petty and it irritated me as I had been honest and parsimonious on my claim. If I had paid a professional an extortionate amount of money to provide a "dehumidifying service", I think that would have been a legitimate claim, go figure.

After I had claimed half of the amount as I wanted to limit my exposure to this firm they emailed me saying the claim was closed. It wasn't and I called them up to discuss/correct this. I think this incompetence must be a reflection on their lack of IT and proper workflow.

If you have the misfortune to deal with Gallagher for a claim I would recommend calling them every single day the day after you send an email to check the status - very tedious, but necessary in my experience.

If you have a serious leak renting or buying a dehumidifer ASAP to speed up the drying process is very useful to reduce risk of mould. I bought a low-end one from Argos as it was sadly cheaper than 2 week rental.

I've attempted to use Checkatrade for three jobs and had a dire experience for all of them.

The site itself is very poor in terms of user experience, it's like they described a site in two paragraphs to an outsourced IT provider who knocked something together, didn't understand workflows and it was never refined after that. If Checkatrade had any interest in their customers they would sit down with some new customers and seek their feedback and ACT on that feedback.

My recent experience involves looking for someone to replace a section of wooden floor. All of the potential tradesmen were hopeless or disinterested. As an alternative approach, I walked to the two nearest local ones on the list of a reputable floor brand and both gave me quotes and one displayed very good product knowledge - a stark contrast.

I had some basic painting done via a Checkatrade tradesman with decent reviews, I wasn't particulalry selective about that and I paid the price - it didn't go well. I've just looked at how they present my review and the maths on the review score is comical.

If you're a landlord and you want a quick solution and don't care about the end result this site may be for you. If you are a homeowner then caveat emptor x100.

Our vehicle gates have suffered from vandalism over the last few years. Principle Estate Management did nothing about this for the first 34 months of managing our property. I'm now looking at a permanently open gate and seeing random people trespassing on our property at night because it's broken again. I was going to put my rubbish out late on Wednesday evening but decided against it as I didn't want to meet any of these random miscreants wandering around. I feel sorry for anyone with a car in the car park as the chance of that being broken into has just increased dramatically. The leaseholders are paying for constant gate repairs when it's been largely caused by the inaction of our property manager in relocating the gate to remove the secluded area that facilitates vandalism and is a favourite of drug users and drug dealers.

They've recently covered and nailed two of our bin stores and a meter cupboard closed to give our property the look of a derelict building. I asked our freeholder about this and got back the reply: "The utility cupboards [sic] should not have been sealed. This was an error by the contractor, whose instruction did not include the sealing of the utility cupboards. We understand that as soon as the issue came to light [I TOLD THEM], the contractor was instructed to reattend and the utility cupboards were made accessible to rectify this error." I have no idea if that's accurate or a falsehood but apparently it's just an "error", i.e. a simple accident and no one is at fault. This is a standard corporate excuse using a chain of sub-contractors in an attempt to avoid responsibility and any discussion of their inadequate supervision.

Most of the communication about our property I get is from another leaseholder. The property manager is incapable or unwilling to keep leaseholders and residents informed of what they are doing to "manage" our property.

They should be advising leaseholders and residents on requesting support for our planning permission application from our local councillors but instead I and another leaseholder are doing this.

Our service charge has jumped by around 40% and the explanation for that keeps changing. Most of our buildings are covered in graffiti, one has a pile of birdshit next to the front door because they aren't capable of installing anti-bird spiking. We've still some very obvious paint pots under our stairs from one of their contractors - this goes against their own recommendations and proves they are not inspecting our property on a regular basis.

Like our freeholder they don't conduct regular surveys of leaseholder/resident satisfaction. It's painfully obvious why.

Over the last couple of years we have had a series of problems with our bin stores and a gas meter cupboard which can be accessed from the street. This has ranged from people sleeping in them, defecating in the area, needle-based drug use, vandalism. The absence of an interim solution from our property manager has unfortunately confirmed my previous prediction on the trend.

A resident recently had to call the police to remove eight people who were congregating in the bin store with a collection of boxed new TVs. A few weeks later one of the doors had been unscrewed from the outside (poor choice of hinge) and dumped nearby.

I've become almost blind to the graffiti our buildings are covered in now although I'm fortunate that I don't live in the building which has bird shit all around the front door. Installation of cheap bird spikes would prevent this.

Principle Estate Management have "managed" our property for 38 months now and could have easily and simply dealt with the bin store issue by putting proper locks on the doors and ensuring residents understood the criticality of keeping the bin stores locked - one would assume self-interest here would make this a very feasible solution. Instead their recent action has been to cover the two bin stores and a meter cupboard completely with a metal gauze to seal them. This is what you see on derelict/condemned buildings and isn't a good look. We now have three metal bins roving around our car park like ronin daleks. They are uncovered and will be gathering the rain today.

More problematically, this now prevents access to the meters in the cupboard. That creates a practical issue for any meter that needs to be manually read and a maintenance and safety issue as it prevents the gas being turned off per flat. It may be illegal too based on my uninformed first reading of The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998.

There's minimal communication from our property manager. The only update we've got was one that mentioned a single bin store being "fully locked and secured" but showed a photograph of the other one and with no mention of the meter cupboard. I don't think they are trying to intentionally mislead us here, I think they simply don't follow what's going on closely. The best updates are from another leaseholder in an information-privileged position who replies to a subset of the leaseholders.

A generic bulk email from the property manager appeared in the last two days about fire safety. That mentioned "Keep the communal areas free of personal items". Ironic, given the property manager's contractor left a load of paint pots under out stairs. They know about this and haven't done anything about it.

I was very surprised to be able to get a small automatic petrol car at an excellent price from Europcar at Lille Europe station, ideal for the Eurostar. As a regular renter I tend to rent from Enterprise as they have the best damage policy and decent pricing but the price on rentalcars.com was about half the competition for this date for some reason.

There are two things I don't like though. The car park they use is very tight and is inappropriate for medium-size or larger cars. You won't notice this if it's not full but I've had problems before with this. It's best to find a return space with two free spaces. The other issue is there's no one to check the vehicle when you return it. This seems to be a modern phenomena with some companies. Again, this all seems fine until you get blamed for some damage that occurred after the return.

The car had to be returned full of fuel. I find this a bit annoying as it means fuelling up just before you return car. There's a TotalEnergies nearby at La Madeleine but you need SatNav and a tiny bit of luck to be able to get there and back to car park as Lille has a complex road system. A 3/4 fuel policy would be easier for everyone.

I now take a slow walkaround video with my smartphone with its light on before and after rental to protect myself against false accusations of damage. I'd advise everyone to do the same.

As a homeowner I've used MyBuilder a bit with reasonable success and thought I'd also give Checkatrade a go. My summary is the website needs a lot of design improvements in terms of business processes, workflow and interface. I have not used their smartphone/tablet app but it must inherit some of the flaws I'll describe.

The 500 character limit for a job description is peculiar. I can understand having the concept of a concise summary but why not let the job be described properly. I hit this limit on my first job and had to do some judicious pruning. And why can you not add photos? It's obvious for many jobs that a few photos would be useful and help tradesmen work out if the job is for them or what it involves.

The first job I put up didn't notify the tradesmen and only did that the next day. That could be a hiccup in their system or I'd speculate it might be an approval step that the homeowner cannot see. That was confusing for both of us.

I don't like its matching process. It immediately auto-matches you with three tradesmen and these people can and often will all phone you right after the job is submitted. I would prefer to be able to first read the reviews of tradesmen and then invite them to the job rather than be at the end of some algorithmic onslaught that hands your phone number out. I don't find it particularly clear what stage the job is at nor what information has been shared with whom.

Many of us are now used to being able to edit things after submission. At a minimum I'd expect a 10 minute window before the job is matched to allow the homeowner to edit the entry in case the homeowner forgot something. And perhaps a way to allow just additional notes after that if there's a desire to avoid changing the original job description.

The chat system seems to be rarely used by tradesmen and for some it's disabled. It's certainly clumsy, it only lets you see a single line of what you're typing even on a desktop browser on a massive screen.

I think they need to provide functionality for tradesmen to politely decline a job ideally with something that encourages the tradesmen to briefly describe why. I found with gas engineers it's almost universal for them to survey the job and if they don't like it they will then just ignore your messages and phone calls. I know saying no is hard but the cold shoulder thing is confusing if you aren't used to this business practice. For this reason homeowners need to avoid any sequential approach to selecting a tradesmen as this will simply take too long.

The review count is confusing. The number of reviews appears to change! I think the site sometimes shows the number of reviews relevant to the job type you have selected and sometimes the total. This needs to be more clearly presented.

I assumed all Checkatrade reviews were transaction-linked making them a bit more difficult to abuse but I've recently noticed that tradesmen can solicit reviews from non-Checkatrade jobs.

In general, I would advise reading through plenty of reviews (from multiple sites) if you are having any substantial work done rather than relying on scores. I've found Which (Magazine's) Trusted Trader reviews to be useful and from personal experience they are fairly thorough on verifying them.

I was looking for some good quality 3-4mm wood for a small project. There can be some good quality plywood with attractive faces in this size but there's also a lot of mediocre sheets that will have an unattractive edge when cut even with sanding. Sketch Laser Cutting have a good range of solid hardwoods in 100mm and 150mm solid sheets, intended for the cutting side of the business.

A shop is ideal for being able to check and select the wood based on grain, there's no shop but you can arrange to collect Mon-Fri - it's right next to Deptford Bridge DLR. I dropped by just before they closed and picked up 3 wood sheets. I had a chat with Maria and she showed me the stock and offered alternatives if I didn't like the grain. There's a slight curve on the 3mm birch sheet I picked up but not a problematic one. Their cherry isn't aged so will look light in colour.

Stock control could be better, I ordered 3x 3mm which were shown in stock on website but one wasn't. I switched to a 5mm instead.