A single mum with cancer has been left with a huge hole in her wall and had to pull down a roof that 'could kill her son' following a row with her builder.
Georgina Schwan, 41, said her life changed forever when she received a breast cancer diagnosis during the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic. The shock news also came at the same time as she navigated a split with her husband of six years.
After having to move town and spend months in agonising recovery from chemotherapy, the teacher eventually decided to commit to a new orangery so that her four-year-old son James had something to inherit should the worst happen.
But Georgina, from Buntingford, claims she ended up spending thousands of pounds for nothing in return when a building company wrecked her garden and left a huge hole in her wall before they stopped taking her calls.
Just weeks after separating from her husband, Georgina was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2020 - on the very same week the NHS began to shutter non-emergency services to deal with soaring coronavirus cases.
She was forced to ring around multiple hospitals before she "luckily" found one doctor who gave her the two vital operations she needed the day before treatments were suspended.
Despite ending their relationship, the pair then moved back in together as she navigated her way through an "exhausting" and painful recovery during lockdown, which included high amounts of hormone therapy drug tamoxifen.
Though her ex-husband provided care for her during that time, their relationship had already run its course and they eventually went ahead with the divorce as planned in February 2021.
Georgina moved out with her son to a smaller property in the town of Buntingford in Hertfordshire around that time, where her thoughts began to turn to how she could best support her son if she died.
She said: "They said if your cancer comes back within two years, it’s chronic. That means it can keep coming back, and keep coming back.
"But the chemotherapy was so bad, I just didn’t know how long I could fight it for if that happened. My thinking was make the house perfect so you’ll leave something for your son - if it got rented out, the rent would pay for the mortgage and he’d inherit something from me.
"And if I made it look beautiful, he’d know I love him, because it would be perfect for him. I also made loads of videos telling him much I love him, and little things I was thinking."
Georgina decided to have an orangery installed to the rear of the home, but prices were far outside what she could afford at the time.
So when a builder claiming to be from a local family-run firm Castle Home Renovations in Peterborough arrived at her door in November 2021 promising to do the job for a £20,000, she "almost felt it was fate".
She said she told him about her recent divorce and her struggles with cancer, and the builder - who has since left the business - agreed to an upfront fee of £14,000, after he told her he’d take the job on as he 'wanted to do right' by the family.
"He said 'don't worry, we'll take care of you'," Georgina recalled.
When work started in March the following year, problems began to appear early when the builders - who she claims 'broke in' to her property - allegedly poured concrete into the garden drains.
This came as costs quickly mounted, and she claims they repeatedly asked her for a further fee of £3,000 for equipment, including a roof lantern.
After growing increasingly unimpressed with their work, Georgina sent out for advice on a Facebook mum’s group in July, and a local surveyor volunteered to come over to look at the work.
He listed eight things that were non-compliant with the building, she claimed, and so "everything they’d already built had to be taken down".
She told the business owner she wanted the structure coming down and replaced. A day later, a roofer from the firm turned up and drilled a hole in the wall of the kitchen.
She claims the exposed hole was the "size of a hand", and has never been filled in - other than with her own DIY. It left cold air blowing into the kitchen over the winter as energy prices rise and she continues her recovery from cancer.
Meanwhile, a quick inspection of the roof showed "even to the untrained eye" that it was not properly installed. When a builder from next door came to have a look at the work, she claims he told her that it would "fall down on you and your boy, and will kill you".
Recalling what she saw, she claims: “It’s got no support, nothing is holding this roof up - it’s balanced.
“If they’d finished the roof off, it probably would have killed us, or definitely would’ve fallen down at some point.”
The original structure was eventually pulled down along with the roof, leaving her with rubble "everywhere", and in the autumn she was forced to shell out a further £6,000 for planning permission for her revised plans.
When she sent the plans to Castle in December, she was allegedly told that workers would be around in January 2023 to restart the new job and finish it in two weeks.
But she claims they failed to start work at the start of the year, and told Georgina they were waiting for a skip licence.
She said she "didn’t believe a word they were saying" and decided to ask the council about it herself. Georgina claims the council said there were no outstanding requests for a skip for any of the surrounding roads.
Georgina claimed they admitted to her soon afterwards that they had never submitted the skip permit. The director of the firm told her on the phone the delay was caused by waiting for a build-over permit from water company Affinity water - despite her being with Thames Water.
"I said 'you’re just lying and lying, you’re not going to do it are you?'", she recalled.
She claims the firm has now stopped taking her calls altogether, and that shortly before she started the GoFundMe, she received a message from the director saying he was winding the business down for a few weeks due to "family matters".
The financial hit has meant she doesn't currently have enough in her savings to mount a legal case, and she said her home insurance is refusing to pay out on the damage.
Georgina believes the company deliberately exploited her cancer to take advantage of her financially, when she was at her most vulnerable.
"I think I've got post-traumatic stress more from this than the cancer, honestly", she said.
"It's so awful because it makes you feel like a little girl. I'm a 40-year-old woman who's trying to be strong and make it out on her own, and I was trying to placate these guys because they had so much control over me, and they had all my money and all my savings.
"Unless I was really nice to them and did everything they said, like a captor, I wasn't going to get anything back.
“I think the really sick thing is that when they met me, they knew I was ill and I could have two years, I could have five years, and they met my little boy.
"I feel like an idiot because I thought being ill and being a single mum would somehow protect me from cowboy builders, or the worst of it because I couldn’t believe that anyone would do this.”
A GoFundMe page has currently raised £1,435 of her £14,000 target - something Georgina says has already restored some of her belief that people can be "good, and kind, and supportive".
Castle Home Renovations director Martin Upton claimed the delays had arisen early last summer after she asked for the orangery to be changed into a home extension. Orangeries don't require planning permission, but home extensions do.
He said: "Georgina signed with us a year ago and we built the structure with a base, brick and block walls. We built a roof and have a sky lantern ready to be fitted when the roof was finished.
"We have built all that and charged according to our payment terms, which were written down for her.
"She then said as an extra job she would like a wall knocking through and French doors put in place where the external wall is at the moment.
"Georgina then tells us she has informed building control, even though we were contracted to build a conservatory/orangery which is an allowable build outside of building control. Instead of him applying control to the French door wall cut out, she had someone out there. We were then told it has to be redone as it wasn’t up to standard.
"We were not contracted to do extension, as we don’t build those, and the cut out was a separate job not part of the conservatory build.
"We agreed to take it down after threatening some sort of action, which we did. We then had to break up the base so we could put extension footings down, which we are in the process of doing, but need to get permission from Thames Water to do this.
"Extensions cost well in excess of £30,000 and we would never have agreed to do it for £20,000."
He also said that the company "never asked for lantern money up front", and that "the money she has paid us is our agreed terms".
Martin added: "We plan on getting on with this 'rebuild' shortly - we are still trading, and Companies House will confirm that.
"We have not meant to cause any stress to Ms Schwan and for that we apologise, but we are in process of building something way more than the contracted work.
"We knew she had had cancer and have tried our best to get this finished as quick as possible. But the whole rebuild has smashed our budget. We are still willing to rebuild using the same materials we built and was asked to take down by her."
He added that Castle Home Renovations is currently dealing with whether buildover permission is needed to construct the structure over water drains - and said that while his builders claim that they do, Georgina does not.
