I fell into building and construction at 16 years old. I was working on a farm, which is what I really wanted to do, but the farm was sold and I needed a job quickly.
My father’s friend offered me work as a labourer with a maintenance company, doing renovations and car parks for pubs. I did the donkey work for the tradesmen – shovelling tarmac into a wheelbarrow and tipping it out. You had to start at the bottom and do all the dog’s body jobs back then, in 1979.
A plasterer asked me to come to work for him as a labourer. I did that for two years, going around sites in Dorset and Hampshire, mixing the plaster and washing up. Then I was offered another job with some bricklayers so I started housebuilding with them. Again I did the grunt work – carried the bricks and mixed up the cement.
After five years working with them, I had picked up a lot of skills and could lay bricks to a good standard. I got a job with another maintenance company working with estate agents doing repairs on properties up for sales until, finally, after five years, I struck out on my own as a sole trader in the mid-1990s, focusing on plastering.
I mainly worked on renovations. All of a sudden, I got busy. I worked flat out, week after week, month after month, rarely taking a day off.
I had a wife and two small children so I was constantly working to pay for my family and to pay off my mortgage. That really got me out of bed every morning.
I would take on every job because I was concerned that the work would dry up. I was able to take the odd day off, but any more than two or three days and I’d worry that I was losing money.
Now, I’m in a different situation. I’ve paid my mortgage off and my two sons are in their twenties. Ideally I work three days a week but at the moment it’s five days a week.
I’m not ready to give up work – the money helps and I like to feel I have a purpose. But I’m not chasing money anymore. If I get a quiet spell now, I’m quite happy to have a few days off. I try to finish early as well. If I’m still working at 4pm, that’s a late day for me now, whereas when I was starting out, I’d work until 8pm.
If it’s an easy job, my day rate is £200, if the work is a bit more complicated, for example if I’m doing lime plastering which is quite specialist, I’ll charge up to £250 a day.
Working part time, I make between £30,000 and £35,000 a year. But younger plasterers, who work full time, week in week out, earn £45,000 to £50,000.
Plumbers and electricians are the best paid of the tradesmen. A self-employed plumber could earn £350 a day and some of them are touching £100,000 a year. A jobbing electrician working near me will earn £1,000 a week. The best scaffolders can probably make £1,000 a week and more in London, but that’s a very hard job.
Plasterers hover in the middle in terms of pay. I’ve sometimes thought I should have been an electrician but I try not to dwell on what might have been.
I’ve had a couple of customers who tried to get out of paying me over the years I’ve been doing this but I really try to suss out a customer before I take on a job. Occasionally I’ve priced a job and the prospective customer has asked me to provide an itemised bill including the cost of all the materials.
I steer clear of people like that. My price is my price. If I was taking my car to the mechanic, I wouldn’t ask him for an itemised bill of the parts. I’ve learnt that it’s best to not take the job and save yourself the trouble.
Some customers are demanding. I will finish a day’s work and when I arrive in the morning the customer has changed her mind – it’s often the wife I deal with – and she wants a wall (that I just put up) moved somewhere else.
I’ve had a couple of people say, “oh, could you just do this...” as though it’s straightforward to change something like a wall. But I just explain that they will have to pay for that change and if they are happy with that, I’m happy to move it around for them.
My best job was back in 2006 when I went to France to work on a huge barn for two customers who were dividing it into two properties. I laid a floor screed and did all the lime rendering. Work started at eight in the morning and then we broke for lunch for a full hour from one until two with a big table laden with food.
We went back to work and then, at six o’clock, we’d have a couple of beers, another meal, and we’d go off and play tennis. It was the most enjoyable job I ever had.
Plastering is repetitive but you could argue that an accountant’s work is repetitive. Each job has its own challenges. Plastering around a fireplace or plastering a basement requires a different approach and problem-solving. I find the work meditative.
From start to finish, I spend about three hours mixing up a bucket of plaster and putting it on the walls; during that time, my brain is thinking all sorts of things.
The best part of my job is the satisfaction of thinking you’ve done the work well. I love coming back to a house and seeing it all finished and decorated, and thinking that I played a part in making that home look fabulous. It always feels good when the customer is happy. The money also helps and so does the freedom of working for yourself.
The worst part of the job is the aches and pains that it has caused me. It is very physical work. I can get home after a day of work, sit down, and I can’t get back up because my body has seized up. That’s why I have to keep going – if I have a week off work and don’t stay active, I can seize up.
I get lower back pain, my right shoulder hurts, my neck aches every now and again and I’ve got sciatica. I try to have regular physiotherapy and acupuncture from a Chinese doctor. He’s a miracle worker; he keeps me going.
I’ve also been to the eye hospital twice because I’ve had plaster in my eyes. Normally you get a little bit of plaster in there and you can wash it out, but when I’ve been rushing on a job, it’s burnt so much that I’ve had to go to A&E to get it sorted.
I’m 61 now and it does annoy me that I won’t get my state pension until I’m 67. (I do have a private pension as well). I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep working as a plasterer until 67, so I may have to stop before then.
I have certainly encountered cowboy builders. Because we’re running out of plumbers, plasterers, electricians and tradespeople in general, you see a lot of people starting out without experience. I’ve had to go to jobs that have been mucked up by a young plasterer.
I don’t think they are trying to rip people off but they are trying to do too much too soon, cutting corners and thinking mainly of the money. I’ve gone through a lot of training and I think, with DIY tutorials online, some guys think they can come in, do it and charge the money – but they’re not able to do the job well enough.
But I think there are far more good builders than there are cowboy builders. I always tell people that the best way to find tradespeople is to go to a local pub and get a recommendation.
There is a snobbery towards the building trade. With the push in the late 1990s to get everyone to go to university, there was an assumption that you only went into construction if you had done badly at school. That attitude has caught up with us now and we’ve got a shortage of tradespeople.
I think there’s also a misconception that builders are all a jack-the-lad type, wolf whistling and reading tabloid newspapers. But I am not like that nor are the builders I work with. I’m not saying you don’t have laddish builders but there are also builders like me, who listen to classical music and plays and Radio 4 when I’m on site.
The trade has treated me well. I bought my first home when I was 25 years old, married a few years later. I’m still married 32 years later, I have two sons, both in their twenties and working, and I’ve paid my mortgage off. I think I’ve done well. I’m quite content.
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