Kulteam Avoid at all costs 0 stars
Avoid at all costs 0 stars
I met with Kamil from Kulteam at the beginning of the year. At the time, he seemed very charming and helpful, and seemed to say all the right things.
His unprofessionalism showed up from the very beginning, as he was flirtatious and shared lots of personal information with me about his private life, including a court document, concerning him, his ex partner and his son; that he insisted I read.
I needed the work done at my flat and trusted that he would do everything he promised to the standard that I had asked for ; and put what I knew about his personal life to one side.
The nasty side of his character described in the court document quickly unravelled during the time he worked on my flat renovations.
He was very rude to me on many, occasions saying very inappropriate and disrespectful things.
He was very rarely on site and he had employed people that he barely knew to renovate my flat, all of whom regularly complained to me about how he treated them.
He pretty much gaslit me the whole way through; telling me that I had no right to be at my own property. There was a point when I was pointing out some problems that I had with the way his worker had laid my tiled flooring, and he told me not to be like a Pakistani man on my hands and knees touching the floor, looking for faults. He also said he didn't know that this was Dubai in Slough, meaning that my standards were far too high and they shouldn't be because of where I live.
Knowing that my dad had passed away and it was his flat that I was renovating, he told me that my energy was bad and my dad would not be proud of me; deliberately playing on my vulnerabilities.
There were so many things that I wasn't happy with from the moment he started my job, and it was so extremely difficult to communicate with him without him getting upset with me.
When I'd go to buy things for the flat, the shop assistants would always tell me to speak to my builder, and I used to laugh and say what kind of person he was. They couldn't believe it. So many of my friends told me that I'm paying him, so he shouldn't be speaking to me that way. I'm usually very strong, but he really disempowered me.
There wasn't one thing, that he and his team did in my flat, that was done well/professionally.
There were rooms that I closed off because they had all my possessions in them, and he accessed the rooms without my permission and made a mess in there, using them for storage.
He had no respect for my belongings or any damage caused. He even actually told me he didn't care when I expressed concern.
He had told me to buy everything that I needed for the flat in advance, but there was no room to store anything, as the flat is small and there's little space to work.
He / team worked in a mess with rubble everywhere, and complained about the lack of room.
He /team did everything upside down ie, started with the floor then worked upwards instead of the other way around.
He also suggested that I clean up after him when I received complaints from my neighbours. I even got in trouble with the council.
He also demanded money regularly and got very nasty about needing cash because he had gone above his tax threshold.
I eventually got some of my friends to help me get him out for good.
It has been a traumatic experience for me (3 months, and he told me it would take 3 weeks), and what's worse is that I have a new builder who literally had to rip everything up and is redoing everything all over again. This has cost me untold expenses that I hadn't budgeted for.
The worst part of all of this is that my new builder discovered a number of illegal things that Kamil had done at my flat. Kamil isn't a Gas Safe engineer, and my 1 year old boiler stopped working. When British gas and my new builder delved into it, they discovered that a gas pipe was joined with a water pipe connector. I've since reported this to the Gas Safe team, but I'm not quite sure if they've taken any action. However, being in a block of flats, this could have caused an explosion.
I feel that builders like Kamil get away with this time and time again. I have no idea how to stop him/ get him struck off, because I feel that he's protected /there's no justice, and customers like me are always left in the lurch to foot the bills and clean up after the messes that they've made (financially). I feel it's very unfair and I just wanted to make anyone out there aware who is looking to employ Kamil from Kulteam.
Ironically, his tagline is "No Ordinary Builder"