After live-in cleaners, au pairs, nannies and even lady’s maids, the next must-have addition to your staff could be the live-in builder. Plenty of homeowners, of course, have suffered the almost-live-in builders – the ones who stay too long, tell you when you have run out of tea bags and milk and even relay family news they have overheard on the answering machine.

Most of us would never consider actually asking a builder to move in. However, when David Williams and his Australian-born girlfriend, Amanda Blackhall, set out to renovate their newly acquired three-bedroom home in a row of pretty Victorian terraced houses in Battersea, southwest London, they did just that. They placed an ad seeking a skilled carpenter on the website www.gumtree.com, offering daily employment for 10 weeks – plus a bed for the night. “It was a sweetener,” says Williams, 30, who works for a consulting firm. “The cost of the job was the same; it just helped to broaden the search.”

The couple were inundated with replies. “About 25 were from Polish or other eastern-European builders, with a varied range of experience and English,” Williams says. “There was even a Hungarian. He was ex-army and a former lumberjack. He was looking for a change and thought he might be good at building. We didn’t reply.”

One of the applications that stood out was from Noah Redfern, a nonsmoking, nondrinking builder from Swansea. He was hired after an interview, and moved into the house with his tools and set of saucepans.

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BACKGROUND

• The high life

• Inner dilemma: adapting a home for an elderly relative

Williams and Blackhall, 33, who bought the £425,000 house last December, initially rented a flat nearby, while the structural work was carried out. The project involved knocking through false walls, opening up the downstairs into one airy living space, fitting bespoke furniture and installing a spiral staircase to link the small patio to a decked terrace, doubling the outside space.

Redfern, meanwhile, remained in the house the whole time, although he did have to go round to the couple’s flat for a nightly bath during the four weeks that the water was switched off. “The alternative was sleeping on friends’ floors,” he says. “So having a whole house was very attractive. I started in the front bedroom, then the spare room, and my final resting place is what will be the study. The guys call it the rats’ nest.”

When works had advanced sufficiently, the couple moved back in to join Redfern. It was like having a lodger, Williams says. “We shared a fridge, the kitchen and the bathroom for a while,” he says. “Also, having a builder on site meant that other workmen could leave their tools there, and there was someone in the house 24 hours a day.”

Not that it was all plain sailing. Blackhall, also a consultant for a large City firm, was not happy about tools left in the living room every night. Nor was she impressed by the collection of tea bags in the sink and the crumbs left uncleared in the kitchen.

Minor niggles apart, this kind of arrangement can work, as the couple’s experience shows – not least by increasing the pool of potential builders: offering accommodation, especially in a high-cost location such as London, means your choice is not restricted to a local firm. If the builder lives in, then, by definition, he is going to turn up for work in the morning. And the very fact of living on the site may also make him more committed and less inclined to hop from one site to another.

It pays to be careful, though, before inviting a stranger into your home, even when it is little more than a building site. Always ask any budding builder turned housemate for references, speak to his previous clients and, to make sure he doesn’t become too comfortable in your home, set a price for the job and not per day.

There can also be some less easily foreseen consequences: one south London homeowner was surprised to come home one evening to find his live-in Polish builder sitting on an upturned box, surrounded by bottles of beer, serenading the French au pair on his guitar. A stern look, together with a couple of questions about the wellbeing of his wife back in Warsaw, brought him swiftly back to earth.

Such goings-on pale beside the experiences of Jane Smith, from south Hampstead, in northwest London, who invited a builder round to give her a quote on refurbishing and extending her four-storey home. “At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, but he asked a series of odd questions, such as, was there any central heating? Then he left, saying he would be in touch with a quote,” she recalled.

A week later, when she returned to the house – which was little more than a shell – she found that some Poles were squatting in the basement, having changed the basement door and installed a Yale lock. Suspicious, she called the man who had quoted for the job, only to be told the squatters would leave if she gave him the contract. It took six and a half weeks, £9,000 in legal fees and the imminent arrival of a bailiff to get them out.

Back in Battersea, Williams, by contrast, is a happy man. He has a newly renovated home and a new pal. “I think we’ll stay in touch,” he says. “The only thing I don’t like is when he calls me ‘boss’.”

Noah Redfern: 07766 010276

Rules of the trade

- Set ground rules. Fix times for the bathroom – you don’t want to be late for work because your builder is singing in the shower

- Set aside a shelf in the fridge and cupboard space for your new housemate

- Make it clear whether you are offering live-in Monday to Friday or full-time board. Alternatively, move your builder in, and move out to a rented flat yourself

For a list of reputable builders and advice on employing a builder, contact the Federation of Master Builders; 020 7242 7583, www.fmb.org.uk

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