What to look for in a Garden Structures company

By Alex Murphy.

No one wants to buy from a company that might be in financial trouble, especially in these uncertain times. To do so is to risk every penny you have paid. If a company goes into administration before your goods have been delivered, then they are under no obligation to deliver your product or refund your money. You could end up losing everything.

Credit card companies cover against this, but getting your money back can sometimes seem like getting blood from a stone. Even if you do manage to get your money back, it will no doubt be delayed and could take months or years.

My family and I own Dunster House and the factories overseas that manufacture our product ranges. We are constantly vigilant against fly by night, new start up, web-only merchants who could potentially risk consumers' money and bring our industry into disrepute. Here are my tips on things you should look out for so you can avoid being stung:

Credit Rating.

Look for a company that has a good credit rating. This can reassure you that the company you are dealing with is financially stable, your money is safe and you will receive your product.

Company credit ratings are publicly available (for a small administration fee) from services such as www.checkrate.co.uk. For approximately £5 + VAT, you can discover if your investment is safe and potentially save a lot of money!

Buy from an Established Company.

Vehicles.

Look for a company that invests in assets. Owning its own delivery vehicles is a good sign. This means the company is intending to be around for a long time. Ask the companies you are enquiring with if they will be delivering with their own vans and trucks or if they use a delivery company.

A company delivering with their own vehicles will also have expert drivers who know how to handle the products and how to ensure they reach you in the right condition.

For example, Dunster House even has custom built vehicles specially designed for our products.

Buy from a Diverse Company.

Look for a company that is constantly bringing out new products. A financially safe company will sell lots of different products to give themselves that security.

For example, look for a company that not only does lots of garden products like Climbing Frames, Worksheds, Decking Kits, Log Cabins and Greenhouses, but also lifestyle products such as windows and doors and solar products. This shows a company is constantly expanding and adding to its range and is confident in its future.

Buy from a Growing Company.

Look for companies that are continually expanding, opening new factories and are constantly buying new vehicles. This shows the strength of the company you are buying from. This means that the company re-invests its profits back into the business and isn’t taken by greedy Shareholders or Directors.

Try looking at the “contact us” pages on a company's website and see how many factories are listed. An expanding company spends its money employing new staff, new drivers and new installers so that they can expand their service and offer their products to more and more customers.

Make Sure you Buy from the Experts.

The key here is to make sure the company you buy from also designs the products. Ask the companies what processes they go through. A good company will design and prototype to fix any bugs. Any expert will tell you the same thing: prototyping a product brings up faults, but it allows the experts the chance to fix them, before the product ever reaches a customer.

Make sure you get some kind of photographic representation and definitely don’t just buy based upon a 3D computer drawing because this would mean that they have probably never made one of these products before.

Make Sure they are Manufactured in Dedicated Factories.

The importance of this is to make sure the products are made by professionals. Try to buy from a company whose products are unique to them.

The simple way to do this is to search for the name on an online search engine, such as Google. If you have lots of results from different companies, be wary! You can be almost certain that, big or small, the company you are buying from is not the manufacturer.

A lot of manufacturers sell to lots of different agent companies. However, the manufacturer is normally still the company doing the delivering, so a lot of your money is just going to pay a fee to the company for doing none of the work.

Avoid this by buying from a company where there are no middlemen, and they are happy to show you where the products are made.

These photos show 3 of our different products, Climbing Frames, Log Cabins and Double Glazing, being made in 3 separate factories, each managed by an expert in their field of the product.

Buy from a UK Company.

A UK company means they know the planning laws and safety standards required for the UK market. A lot of buildings designed for the European market would need planning permission in the UK. A UK company can design their products to fit into what is required for placing in a garden in the UK.

You can tell a UK company by the language they use. A company that is just selling European products may have bad use of the English language. Not just the occasional typo, but whole words out of order and the wrong words being used at the wrong time.

Look at the design of the windows. Typically, timber buildings imported from Europe have inward opening windows. These are not popular in the UK as the British customer normally prefers to have curtains or blinds on the inside, and an inward opening window would foul these. Inward opening windows are also more likely to have the hinges on the side. This means they are much more likely to fail than a window with the hinges at the top. It is also harder to create a water seal as the opening section of the window will be inside the frame of the window, meaning that wind can drive water in through the window over time, causing damp on any furniture you have near it.

Climbing Frame companies importing from America will typically be selling a non pressure treated climbing frame, whereas a UK company knows the weather conditions in the UK and knows that pressure treated timber is the best option.

Make Sure the Company Only Trades Under One Name.

This is very important to ensure that you know exactly who you are dealing with. A company with a poor financial footing may trade under lots of different names. This may be so that in the future they can put one part of the company into administration whilst they carry on trading with the other. Let's hope you haven't got an order with them at that point or you will find all of a sudden that your order was with the bankrupt company and it has disappeared!

To avoid this there are some simple steps you can take. Look out for lots of different websites trading with the same product. This might just mean that they are an agent reselling someone else's products, or worse, it could be the same company in disguise! Try looking at the contact telephone numbers or contact addresses to see if they match up.

Read your paperwork carefully, and make sure you know who it is that you have your contract with. If you receive estimates or emails with a different company name, this should ring alarm bells for you.

Make sure they have a Dedicated After Sales Department.

The last thing anyone wants is for there to be a problem with your delivery. If you have taken the time to make sure that you are buying from a company that designs the products, prototypes them, stocks them and delivers them themselves, then you are very unlikely to have any sort of problems.

But people are still human and no matter how hard people try, the very rare mistake can slip through. Make sure before you buy that the company you want to buy from have a dedicated Customer Services department so that you can have a proper response. A good sign is if they have a dedicated email address for you to send problems to, as this means they have a dedicated group of people to action those emails and they are trained in how to get you the best response.

Buy a Design that Works.

Look for a tried and tested design. A lot of new, flash in the pan companies will come up with designs that seem unique. This is because, without experience, they do not realise the designs are flawed.

For example, our log cabin windows are made with simple metal stays. Some companies boast about complicated locking mechanisms. Our company was founded over 15 years ago as a Windows company. If we wanted to fit a more complicated locking system, we could do this with ease, but we have yet to be convinced that this type of system could stand up to the massive movement through expansion and contraction that a wooden window would be subjected to.

For example, a plastic window will expand by 1mm or 2mm. We know that a timber window can expand and contract by 8mm to 20mm. We do not believe that a complicated locking system could take this type of movement.

Beware of “Guarantees”.

A lot of companies will appear to offer very generous “guarantees” on garden buildings. Always read the small print. In truth, it is very difficult to offer a guarantee on a timber product for exterior use. Timber, as a natural product, expands and contracts in different weather conditions, and as such, a timber building will need some adjustment over its lifetime. With the correct adjustment and treatment, a good quality spruce log cabin, for example, could easily last you decades. However, without the wood being treated at the recommended intervals, the timber could become damaged in the sun or become split or warped through weather and lack of treatment.

As such, most “guarantees” you read will have copious amounts of small print, covering the standard of installation, the type of treatment to use, the type of roofing material to use, how often to treat the cabin, etc. We recommend you read the small print as we believe it would be almost impossible to fulfil all the criteria and actually claim on a “guarantee” like this. Even if you did fulfil all the criteria on a guarantee how can you 100% prove that you have treated a product each year, typically required by such guarantees, short of filming yourself treating it each year this would be very hard to prove (‘any receipts could have been used to treat the garden fence not the building’ would be their defence if you did encounter problems).

Beware of “guarantees” being offered from companies with a poor credit rating, or from companies that have only recently been incorporated. For example, if a company offers you a 3 year “guarantee” but has only been around for a year, how can you expect them to still be around in the future to honour it? The majority of companies fail within the first 5 years so be careful you do not become tricked into a false sense of security. Make sure the company you are buying with has been established for longer than this. To our customers our Guarantee on untreated timber products is that we do not want to destroy the good name of our Company that we have spent over 15 years building by allowing sub standard products to be delivered, this is a family firm and there is already a third generation born who we hope will inherit a thriving, growing and honest Company in 20 years time.

Only believe in a Guarantee if it is specific about what it covers, has no small print attached, and is from a company that has been established longer than the Guarantee is offered for. For example, we offer a 10 year Guarantee against rot and insect infestation on our pressure treated timber. Why? Because the type of treatment we use should mean that there should be no chance of the timber suffering from rot or insect infestation. That said, we have been around for over 15 years, so if you unfortunately do have the piece of pressure treated timber that is the one in a million that does somehow gain woodworm, you can be sure that we will still be here in 10 years time to replace it.

Planning Permission – Why is the 2.5m rule important...

Planning permission can be a complicated mine field – it was not made any easier when the UK government added another set of rules in October 2008. Word for word, the rule that has most affected log cabins is thus:

1) E.1 d) (ii) Development is not permitted by Class E if the height of the building, enclosure or container would exceed 2.5 metres in the case of a building enclosure or container within 2 metres of the boundary of the curtilage of the dwelling house,

In plain English, if the cabin, shed, greenhouse etc. is over 2.5m high and within 2m of a fence, hedge, wall etc., you are not allowed to erect it without planning permission.

There is another rule, which reads like this:

2) E.1 e) Development is not permitted by Class E if the height of the eaves of the building would exceed 2.5m metres

Click here for more information

We are advertising “Our Log Cabins are under 2.5m high!!!*” because of Rule 1. Some of our competitors, because of the fact that a lot of them cannot supply buildings under 2.5m as they are not the manufacturers, say that we mean the second of these rules and that their buildings are therefore the same.

You should be careful you are not misled over these planning permission rules – in a small garden, you simply will not be allowed to build a cabin over 2.5m high and even in a large garden, you will be severely restricted as to where one could be erected. We MUST understand these rules and understand just HOW important they are. Imagine most peoples’ gardens – imagine having to leave 2m space all the way around… this would mean that a 4m x 4m cabin would need 8m x 8m clear space all the way around – you would need 4 times as much space as before to place a cabin!

*Except Vanguard, Trent and Ottery

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