RETURNING HOME to her Sheung Wan flat one evening after a heavy downpour, Samantha Sin Lai-man was greeted by an unpleasant surprise. The new roof on her patio extension had leaked and ruined all her electrical equipment.
Whenever Gwyneth Pratt walks into the bathroom of her renovated village house on South Lantau she can't help noticing two shades of wall tiles. Her contractor, having erected a 'wonky' wall, had to chip off half the new tiles to straighten the surface. Unfortunately, there were no more tiles from the original batch so Pratt had to settle for a slightly different hue.
Jason Lumley received a nasty shock when changing a light fitting in his 20-year-old Lamma Island flat. Isolating the supply at the fuse box wasn't enough. His household electrics had been wired straight into the mains with no breaker.
If these incidents sound familiar, you may be among the 111 home owners who complained to the Consumer Council in the first half of this year about poor workmanship, ranging from leaking windows to badly installed fixtures and fittings. In 2004 there were 170 complaints, with that number jumping to 249 last year.
Hong Kong doesn't have a monopoly on shoddy workmanship, yet stories of poor brickwork, bad tiling, and leaky plumbing abound. According to the experts, the reasons are usually a combination of poor communication between customer and contractor, use of unskilled or unlicensed tradespeople, and cheap building materials.
'Normally, we'll go to a contractor we've used before or the client will recommend a contractor who may be a friend or someone they trust,' says designer Philip Tang Chi-ho of Ptang Studio, an architectural and interior design company. 'But even if you know the contractor you can't always control what workers they use.'