Hi all,
I'm looking for some advice if I may. Please bear with me - this is my first post and I want to try and give as much detail whilst keeping it relevant.
We are first homeowners - neither of us in the trade industry so definitely quite naive and lacking in knowledge. As they say, you learn a lot after your first build. With our house, came a small alfresco area which sat in the middle of the house at the rear. The builder originally quoted 40k to extend the alfresco the length of the house so we decided on much advice to leave it and do it separately. We had what appeared to be a reputable concreting company extend the slab for us and also do our driveway and a side path. A tiler separately tiled the extended slab, and a landscaper later built a retaining wall directly at the edge of the slab.
Neither the concreter or the landscaper mentioned drainage between the slab (we didn't even think about it - which I know sounds ridiculous and we do take responsibility for that) and the wall and now the issue is with water ponding on the slab and slowly banking up when we get those heavy rain days. Checking the levels with a spirit level on the (now tiled) slab, we noticed that the fall is very uneven. The corner edge tiles appear to fall towards the house, hence why water is not falling off. This issue aside, there is also no drain as I have mentioned.
So, we invited the concreter back to take a look who immediately said the landscaper should have set the retaining wall back at least 400-600mm from the edge of the slab and then used a laser level to tell us there IS fall and that this was "the tilers fault". He claims the tiler has used more glue on a few of the tiles resulting in water sitting on higher tiles and not draining off. This didn't make sense to us and the tiles certainly appear to look like they follow the slab. The concreter said that there are so many allowances in favour of the trades that even if there was a variation in the fall, they wouldn't be deemed responsible to fix it and that the tolerance for concrete is 50mm. When we asked what it would entail to have him cut the slab back enough to insert a drain he made a huge spectacle of the request, saying it would be a huge job, taking 3 days to simply cut the edge of the concrete (we've since learned that this is less than a half day job and won't cost us very much at all). We had an independent tiler visit the property today who says the original tiler has done a great job and glued consistently and evenly and that as the root cause, this is a poor concrete job with not enough fall.
My question is, is it worth having a builder complete an inspection with a report and then going down the path of Fair Trading to determine who is at fault here to have the responsible trade rectify the issue? Is the concreter correct or is he using a scare-tactic to deter us from going down the route of FairTrading?
Separately for my own knowledge, is there a requirement for either of the trades (concreter or landscaper) to insert drainage when either pouring a slab so large in an open area or, building a retaining wall directly up against the slab? Is there a requirement to build the wall a set distance from an existing slab?
The plan from here is to have the slab cut back enough to allow room for an ag pipe, cover with pebbles at a slightly lower level to the slab so allow the water to fall away and into the drainage system.
Thank you all in advance, I'm sure many of you who are experts in your field are frustrated by my lack of knowledge. We live and learn.