Cowboy Builders

Melinda and Dom are in Eastbourne helping a single parent whose life has been turned upside down. Following his wife's death, 50 year­old-chef David Kon was left to bring up his three daughters alone. But their Eastbourne semi was not big enough, so David decided to extend into the loft to give each of his girls a room of their own. Unfortunately for the Kon family, the builder they paid £31,000 to do the job botched the build and left them with an unfinished death trap above their heads. The stress of the situation has driven the family to despair and David feels like he has failed his children. It is now Melinda and Dom's job to rebuild the loft, catch the cowboy and get this family's life back on track.

Melinda and Dom head to Bath to rescue single mum Jenni Rossi. The 46-year-old school secretary wanted a better home for her and her teenage son, so she decided to remortgage her three-bedroom townhouse to pay for a large open-plan kitchen extension. Jenni obtained a number of quotes from construction companies, but none of them came in below £70,000 - well out of Jenni's price range. When a builder offered to do the job for £32,000, therefore, she jumped at the chance. Sadly, the builder Jenni had hired left the job unfinished. By the time she had already paid £26,000, all Jenny had to show for her money was an empty shell. Building inspectors visited the site and decided that the standard of work was so poor it would have to be condemned. Jenni tried contacting the builder, but received no response. She then discovered that the cowboy had moved house, leaving no forwarding address. With nowhere to turn, Jenni hit rock bottom and has spent the past six months living in little more than a building site. Fortunately, help is at hand. Upon arrival in Bath, Melinda takes on the challenge of rebuilding the extension, giving it a big-budget makeover. But as her builders and designers start work, they discover a number of shocking fundamental flaws. Budget and schedule soon go out the window, but Melinda will stop at nothing to get the best for Jenni - even if that means persuading sympathetic local businesses to donate their services for free. Meanwhile, consumer champion Dom sets about hunting down the construction cheat in an attempt to get Jenni her money back. But since this particular rogue has been AWOL for six months, tracking him down is going to take some serious detective work.

This week, Melinda Messenger and Dominic Littlewood meet a family from Sheffield who were left with a derelict house and thousands of pounds’ worth of debt.

This week, Melinda and Dom meet a family that has endured 18 months of misery at the hands of a cowboy builder. Melinda is keen to transform their home from crater-scarred bomb site to luxury bungalow, but will structural problems see the rebuild ended before it has even begun?

This week, Melinda Messenger and Dominic Littlewood head to the market town of Dunstable in Bedfordshire, where Angus and Tracy are on the brink of collapse. Since a cowboy trashed their extension 12 months ago, the couple’s relationship has been under pressure and may not survive the renovation.

This week Dom and Sheree are on the outskirts of Cardiff, helping a family who have been left to freeze and live in a half-finished extension with no central heating for three years. Care-worker Julia wanted to extend her home to make room for her ageing mother Mary, who had just returned from living in Australia after having a heart-attack. She contracted a builder, the son of someone she thought was a friend, and paid him £64,000 to build a two storey wraparound extension. Six months later, the builder left the job, taking all her life savings and leaving Julia, her mother Mary and her teenage son Chris with an open shell of a home. While Sheree struggles to make her budget stretch far enough to finish this massive job, Dom investigates the cowboy and discovers he may have fled to Thailand. He also meets other victims of the same builder, including a man whose life has fallen apart after the builder left his sewage system leaking into his garden.

Bhavner and her husband Kirit had always known that they would need to extend their small family home when their three sons were too old to share a room. The extension would prove costly for a travel agent and a shop assistant, costing the couple some £30,000. “My dream was that all three children could have a room to themselves,” Kirit says. In 2007, the couple contacted a builder with a good reputation within Leicester’s Asian community. But the unscrupulous charlatan left the family with a garden that looked like a warzone. Instead of the planned lounge, bedroom and bathroom, he erected four walls and left the extension with no roof, no floor and no plumbing. To make space for his shoddy workmanship, he knocked down the family conservatory and damaged the existing roof, leaving a life-threatening stretch of live wires and sockets exposed to the elements. Bhavner began to suffer from panic attacks as her family spent two winters in an unfinished house, taking turns to spend the night on the floor. Dom is determined to bring the builder to justice, but he is nowhere to be found, and has been operating under multiple company names. As Dom meets up with some of the builder’s other victims, he begins to build up a picture of the man. The cowboy has burned through Leicester’s Asian community, taking people’s money and leaving a mess of unfinished, dangerous workmanship in his wake. One 76-year-old customer borrowed money from his family and cashed in his pension to pay for a kitchen extension. The job was left unfinished and the gas disconnected, with the pensioner left to rely on his neighbours for six months. Dom also meets Ash, who suspects that the builder is trying to scam as many people as possible before he flees the country to live with his wife in India. Sheree is determined to give Bhavner and Kirit the home they paid for, but new project manager John is worried that it could strain his resources. The team allocates a whopping £22,000 to the project, almost all of which will be spent on building work. Sheree is left to round up furniture donations from local vendors. Once the extension has been completed, there will be 500 square feet to decorate, so Sheree turns on the charm and heads to town to find a deal. Despite her reservations, she has big plans for the place. “This family are not going to know what hit them,” she says. “It is going to be fabulous.” Dom is on edge. Despite a seemingly never-ending trail of victims, he can’t track down the renegade builder. If the cowboy has left for India, the game could already be up. Dom finally tracks down a former neighbour, who claims to have seen the dodgy builder a few days ago. With the culprit still in Britain, there is still hope to bring him to justice. “The net is drawing in,” Dom declares...

In Dorset, Melinda and Dom meet a grandmother who entrusted a builder with creating an attic conversion where she could recover in peace from a gruelling course of chemotherapy. However, four months later he walked off the job, leaving the family's home, and their lives, in tatters.

This week Dom and Melinda come to the aid of a couple in north-west London, who need to complete a loft conversion and a downstairs extension to give them the space to move their sick grandfather into the family home. The cowboy builder featured in this episode is called John Guerin. The limited companies he trades as, or has formerly traded as, include: Bluewood Constructions Ltd Greyfox Project Management Ltd St Malory Projects Ltd Wynchwood Design & Development Ltd Blue Ferne Construction Ltd Merlyn Refurbishment Litd De Guerin Contruction & Design Ltd

Melinda and Dom come to the rescue of single mother Pam from Camberley, Surrey. Pam was forced to give up the pursuit of her dream job when a cowboy's actions left her on the brink of financial ruin and living in a structurally unsound home.

Dom and Melinda are in Balham to help a pair of newlyweds who had plans to extend their ground floor flat. Following the death of her mother, Sarah and her partner Stuart decided to use the inheritance money to extend their home in south London. They paid their builders £85,000 of a £95,000 contract, but were left with an unfinished shell and severe structural problems. Due to shoddy building work, the entire three-storey block of flats in which the couple live is in danger of collapse. The state of the building is so bad that before Dom and Melinda are even allowed access to the building, a structural engineer insists that emergency props are installed to safely support the walls. Melinda and her team plan to fix the botched work and complete the extension. However, these efforts are thwarted at every turn, as at each stage of the repairs yet more problems are uncovered. Will the team be able to overcome these obstacles to give the couple the apartment they deserve? Meanwhile Dom's investigation reveals that Stuart and Sarah are far from the only victims of this bunch of cowboys. He discovers that the company are making some misleading claims on their website and, as Dom tries to confront the builder in question, he discovers that he is a very difficult man to pin down.

After living in their house for 17 years, a couple decide to invest in an extension for the sake of their adult sons. They thought that by hiring a female builder to undertake the work, they would get someone that they could trust. However, after spending £36,000 they were left with a devastated wreck with no electricity, water or heating.

Dom and Melinda take on their most heart wrenching story yet as they meet a couple who have had to deal with a string of recent tragedies, with the wife's mother and her son both passing away within a matter of months. While they were still grieving, the couple fell victim to a firm of cowboy builders.

The property series exposing Britain's most irresponsible builders returns. Melinda Messenger meets a Wolverhampton man whose plans to provide his seriously ill wife with her dream home were ruined by an errant contractor. The tradesman in question left the home with a catalogue of expensive errors to address, and while Melinda tries to make up for the couple's disappointments, Dominic Littlewood sets out to reclaim some of the money they spent on the project

Dominic and Melinda find the hey find walls filled with toilet paper after they attempt to help a retired couple from Yorkshire who had employed a local builder to erect a large extension to their family home.

Dom and Mel face one of their toughest challenges yet: dealing with a builder who may well offer the worst value for money in Britain. The problem is, no one knows where he is... Christophe and Debra Montoya-Timperley have lived in their three-bedroom semi for ten years. But as their sons, Joshua and Max became older, the family had outgrown the house. So in 2008, they embarked on what they hoped would be a life-changing building project. The couple agreed to the builder's quote of £69,000. But after they had handed over £26,300 of their hard-earned cash, twelve weeks into the job the build came to standstill and the builder vanished without a trace – before he had even dug the foundations! The Montoya-Timperleys won a County Court settlement of £32,000, but they have never been able to track down the builder to get their money back. So Dom has a particularly tricky manhunt on his hands.He has to use all his cunning to find the builder and lure him into a carefully laid trap. Meanwhile, Melinda and her team face a huge challenge. Normally she is tasked with rectifying the mess a builder has left behind, but building an extension from the ground up is a first.

When Karen and Tristan Crook got married in 2011, they did not have to look far to find their first marital home. Karen's grandmother had recently passed away, leaving behind her 1920s semi. The couple decided to buy out her parents and other relatives and become the new owners of the family home. The house needed modernisation so they planned to update the rooms, convert the loft and build a rear extension. They were sure they had found a builder they could trust, as he was an ex-boyfriend from Karen's teenage years. The builder assured them he could do the whole job for £68,000, and quickly got on with ripping everything out. Only trouble is, he did not do much putting back! Four months on, the builder had walked off site with £41,000 of their money, without having started the loft conversion or the extension and leaving their treasured family home gutted. Melinda has a mountain to climb if she is going to get Karen and Tristan into their home – she even resorts to sending out her builder John in search of free materials. Meanwhile, Dom finds out that Karen's ex-boyfriend is a cowboy who is a master of excuses...

Dom and Melinda come to the aid of a single mum in Fleet, who has been left with a house that is not fit for human habitation.

Dom and Mel are in Bradford, where a hard-working Dad has been toiling day and night to fix the mess left behind by a cowboy builder. In 2002 Naheem and Faye Khan bought a three-bedroom bungalow. Back then they had just one child, Ava, now thirteen - but since then the Khans have added five little boys to their brood. The family decided on an extension, but the stress of all living under one roof caused Faye and the kids to move out – making getting the work done all the more important. But having paid their builder £44,000, he walked off – leaving the Khan family with a half built wreck: without windows, doors, heating or electricity. Melinda has a huge task on her hands to prepare for a family of eight to move back home – with thirteen rooms in need of TLC, not to mention there being no kitchen and no bathroom. Meanwhile, Dom is on the trail of the builder who appears to have left a trail of devastation across Bradford. A pattern emerges of the cowboy giving low quotes, and then demanding more money before the job is finished. When he finally comes face to face with Dom, he makes a startling admission...

Melinda Messenger and Dominic Littlewood come to the aid of a couple from Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. John Smith used his redundancy money to pay for an extension to his family home, but after six months the builders downed tools and walked off the job - leaving it leaking, freezing and unusable.

Dominic and Melinda attempt to help eEx-dancer Melissa and chef Carmine who employed a builder they knew from the local Italian community to extend their two-bedroom family flat. They ended up being left with a dangerous, unfinished, uninhabitable shell and full of rats.