Just to warn you, this is a rather tragic tale. It reveals my naïveté about conducting business here, but hopefully it will teach you a thing or two. It has no ending as yet, but I am working on it. This was a great learning experience, not only in the way people conduct business here, but in how to avoid the pitfalls of this system (well, it’s not really a system as such in most cases). In our experience Bulgarian workmanship has lacked a certain finesse that we in the UK are used to. Not only this, but the standard is certainly lower. It certainly pays to take extra precautions and doing your research in order to get exactly what you want. Not knowing anything about staircases we were sort of doomed to failure – now that I have done a lot of reading and sketching, I know of the best sort of staircase to fit the small space that we have allocated to it. Hopefully one day we will have it!

We got a new staircase installed back at the end of September. Our original specification was for wood and metal, which seemed to be the cheapest way of doing it. Then the original builder was no longer able to commit to the task, so our project manager (who happened to be the man who installed our windows) recommended another man, a metal worker, who assured us basically that we should trust him and that he knew what he was doing. We paid our deposit, half the cost of the staircase, upfront. Then we waited for the metal worker to arrive. He finally arrived three weeks after we had parted with our money. Okay, so this is Bulgaria and life is at a slower pace here – I am happy to accept that.

One the first day, the two builders dug a hole of the correct size in the floor of the hallway to fit the staircase. No problems there. They then put the stairs in, with one turn - meaning that the staircase terminated facing a brick wall. I’m not joking – I am not sure what they thought, maybe they thought we would just accept the job as finished. Needless to say I was very very angry! After a good old yell at them (I really was furious) they agreed to come back the following day to add another turn.

The following day, nobody came. The next day, the metal worker came back with a chainsaw and chopped the middle out of the beam that the top of the staircase was resting on… the hall is very narrow so this isn’t a serious issue (obviously the chopped beam will have to be addressed at some point in the near future), but it was completely unnecessary. The guy put in another turn in the staircase so that is fixed, and he fixed a few other things that I pointed out. However as I was bathing the baby he hastily informed Tom that he had finished the job and sped off in his car.

We have not seen him since, nor have we paid the completion fee. The guy that did our windows, a man that we trusted on account of the brilliant job that he did, that sourced the metal worker that made the staircase came round to inspect the stairs and was very apologetic about the standard of the work – he said that someone would come to rectify it the following day but they never did. There are plenty of things that we can fix ourselves at little cost: the floor is unfinished around the hole, the rough metal edges are unfiled. But there are also glaring errors that the builder did not address before he took flight, that we cannot fix ourselves without learning how to weld: the first flight is very steep, as the builder probably miscalculated the spacing of the treads, and the first step is lacking reinforcement (this step is has now come loose on one edge!). Basically it’s a bit of a death trap. But things slow down here during the winter months, so we will have to survive until the spring.

So there you have it, warts and all! I’ll keep you posted as to progress. Here’s hoping that we will get a new, less steep, first flight at no extra charge… but we will see. Either that or I learn how to weld. Actually, I think I would quite enjoy that.