Cowboy Builders

Melinda and Dom are in Eastbourne helping a single parent whose life has been turned upside down. Following his wife's death, 50 year­old-chef David Kon was left to bring up his three daughters alone. But their Eastbourne semi was not big enough, so David decided to extend into the loft to give each of his girls a room of their own. Unfortunately for the Kon family, the builder they paid £31,000 to do the job botched the build and left them with an unfinished death trap above their heads. The stress of the situation has driven the family to despair and David feels like he has failed his children. It is now Melinda and Dom's job to rebuild the loft, catch the cowboy and get this family's life back on track.

This week, Melinda Messenger and Dominic Littlewood meet a family from Sheffield who were left with a derelict house and thousands of pounds’ worth of debt.

This week Dom and Sheree are on the outskirts of Cardiff, helping a family who have been left to freeze and live in a half-finished extension with no central heating for three years. Care-worker Julia wanted to extend her home to make room for her ageing mother Mary, who had just returned from living in Australia after having a heart-attack. She contracted a builder, the son of someone she thought was a friend, and paid him £64,000 to build a two storey wraparound extension. Six months later, the builder left the job, taking all her life savings and leaving Julia, her mother Mary and her teenage son Chris with an open shell of a home. While Sheree struggles to make her budget stretch far enough to finish this massive job, Dom investigates the cowboy and discovers he may have fled to Thailand. He also meets other victims of the same builder, including a man whose life has fallen apart after the builder left his sewage system leaking into his garden.

In Dorset, Melinda and Dom meet a grandmother who entrusted a builder with creating an attic conversion where she could recover in peace from a gruelling course of chemotherapy. However, four months later he walked off the job, leaving the family's home, and their lives, in tatters.

Dom and Melinda are in Balham to help a pair of newlyweds who had plans to extend their ground floor flat. Following the death of her mother, Sarah and her partner Stuart decided to use the inheritance money to extend their home in south London. They paid their builders £85,000 of a £95,000 contract, but were left with an unfinished shell and severe structural problems. Due to shoddy building work, the entire three-storey block of flats in which the couple live is in danger of collapse. The state of the building is so bad that before Dom and Melinda are even allowed access to the building, a structural engineer insists that emergency props are installed to safely support the walls. Melinda and her team plan to fix the botched work and complete the extension. However, these efforts are thwarted at every turn, as at each stage of the repairs yet more problems are uncovered. Will the team be able to overcome these obstacles to give the couple the apartment they deserve? Meanwhile Dom's investigation reveals that Stuart and Sarah are far from the only victims of this bunch of cowboys. He discovers that the company are making some misleading claims on their website and, as Dom tries to confront the builder in question, he discovers that he is a very difficult man to pin down.

The property series exposing Britain's most irresponsible builders returns. Melinda Messenger meets a Wolverhampton man whose plans to provide his seriously ill wife with her dream home were ruined by an errant contractor. The tradesman in question left the home with a catalogue of expensive errors to address, and while Melinda tries to make up for the couple's disappointments, Dominic Littlewood sets out to reclaim some of the money they spent on the project

Dom and Mel face one of their toughest challenges yet: dealing with a builder who may well offer the worst value for money in Britain. The problem is, no one knows where he is... Christophe and Debra Montoya-Timperley have lived in their three-bedroom semi for ten years. But as their sons, Joshua and Max became older, the family had outgrown the house. So in 2008, they embarked on what they hoped would be a life-changing building project. The couple agreed to the builder's quote of £69,000. But after they had handed over £26,300 of their hard-earned cash, twelve weeks into the job the build came to standstill and the builder vanished without a trace – before he had even dug the foundations! The Montoya-Timperleys won a County Court settlement of £32,000, but they have never been able to track down the builder to get their money back. So Dom has a particularly tricky manhunt on his hands.He has to use all his cunning to find the builder and lure him into a carefully laid trap. Meanwhile, Melinda and her team face a huge challenge. Normally she is tasked with rectifying the mess a builder has left behind, but building an extension from the ground up is a first.

Dom and Mel are in Bradford, where a hard-working Dad has been toiling day and night to fix the mess left behind by a cowboy builder. In 2002 Naheem and Faye Khan bought a three-bedroom bungalow. Back then they had just one child, Ava, now thirteen - but since then the Khans have added five little boys to their brood. The family decided on an extension, but the stress of all living under one roof caused Faye and the kids to move out – making getting the work done all the more important. But having paid their builder £44,000, he walked off – leaving the Khan family with a half built wreck: without windows, doors, heating or electricity. Melinda has a huge task on her hands to prepare for a family of eight to move back home – with thirteen rooms in need of TLC, not to mention there being no kitchen and no bathroom. Meanwhile, Dom is on the trail of the builder who appears to have left a trail of devastation across Bradford. A pattern emerges of the cowboy giving low quotes, and then demanding more money before the job is finished. When he finally comes face to face with Dom, he makes a startling admission...