On Schedule !

Choosing the Builder

Surprisingly, we didn't find this hard. When we first started seriously considering the idea of a boat, we thought about the bottom end of the market on the basis that we thought that provided the thing didn't sink, we'd be reasonably safe. The monthly magazines were full of adverts for boat builders and the web provided some guide prices.

Tony fuelled our enthusiasm by saying that some of these companies were able to deliver within 6 to 8 weeks. We came up with some basic prices together with names of suppliers. Then people started saying that boats built by certain builders probably sold better than others and that the cheaper built boats might not have such a high resale value. It was back to the drawing board.

We contacted a number of builders with a general enquiry about price and time scale. We had no idea of the price but wanted our boat sooner rather than later. It was mid summer 2006 and, preferably, we wanted our boat by the autumn so that we had the winter to start fitting her out.

Several firms failed to respond to our enquiries and those that did were either extremely pricey or talking delivery dates too far in the distance. We did get one price and time scale from our first batch of enquiries that seemed reasonable. We used this as a yardstick to compare the other responses against.

By the end of the process we had two potential suppliers. Both were quoting similar prices but one could deliver about six months earlier than the other. We made appointments and went to see them both.

By chance, our first visit took us to G & J Reeves. We were greeted warmly, made to feel at home and as if the company wanted our business. We were shown around their premises and we were very impressed. What was more, if we could make up our mind about what we wanted, and could place the order by early September, we could have our boat by mid October - just in time to move it by canal, before the winter stoppages made movement difficult.

We went to see our other choice. It was almost the complete opposite. We weren't that impressed by their set up. The quality of some of the basic work that we saw didn't appear to be too good although, to be fair, some of their other work looked really nice. We weren't offered a seat, let alone a drink and the earliest delivery date was Spring 2007.

We didn't consciously make up our mind on the spot but, as you may imagine, it wasn't too difficult to make our choice. All we had to do was to find the pennies to pay for it all.

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