Change to amount of work

[ChuckBro]

Evening. Can someone tell me if I send an estimate to do some painting work for a client they agree in principle I get working and they then change the amount of work (less than half of the original work) have they breached the contract? can I ask to renegotiate the estimate? There was never a paper contract just my estimate and there agreement in principle.

 

[Spearmint]

Hi

I'm not in the legal profession but in the building industry so I'm familiar with the scenario.

I think you should avoid trying to turn this into a legal issue, and just focus on what your client needs to pay you to cover the reduced amount of work that that they now want you to do.

To achieve this, you need to calculate what your labour charges will be to fulfil what they've now asked you to do. In terms of the materials that you've purchased to date, if you've purchased all of the materials to do the full job then your customer should pay for those materials as well but you must leave them on site when you complete. Alternatively, you may be able to get a refund from your supplier for unused materials, and if that is the case you can put that option to your client. Sometimes suppliers do charge a small amount to return goods and your customer should pay those charges as well. If the goods to be returned are ones that you're likely to use again, you may prefer not to return them, but this would be up to you. For any special materials such as custom mixed paints for example, your supplier will not give you a refund for those items and these will have to be paid for by your client as well. You may also have plant hire costs that need to be charged, which you should off hire when you complete what you've been asked to do, as these will be hired in your name. Again these costs need to be passed on to your client.

Its quite possible that you could have turned down other work to do the full job for your client and you could end up having no work for a period of time,and I suspect that you may have to suffer that loss, as you had nothing in writing.

If for instance the work that you quoted for involved the decoration of both the ground and first floor rooms and your client asked you to decorate the ground floor rooms only, (I've deliberately avoided bringing a staircase into the equation) there wouldn't be a problem in where you stop the work. However, if you've been asked to stop painting in part of a room there could be. For instance if you'd allowed to decorate the ceiling and walls, a decorator could paint the ceiling quicker knowing that they're going to be painting the walls after. In this scenario it wouldn't be unusual for some of the paint from the ceiling to end up on the walls as well. If your work has now been confined to the ceiling only, you could end up taking longer as you have to cut in to the walls, so it would cost more.

The other thing to bear in mind, is that one has a tendency to discount larger works to give a more favourable rate for the overall job, so if a client reduces the extent of the work it then the cost of the reduced amount would generally be higher but within reason, as you may have to give a breakdown to your client when they ask.

I hope this helps.

Peter