Spalding teacher’s D.I.Y S.O.S job for dad
A maths teacher in Spalding who paid out more than £50,000 to a builder for home improvements has ended up doing the job himself.
Mark Murfit, of Fleet Hargate, was so fed up with the lack of progress made on his 71-year-dad Dave’s barn conversion in the village that he finally took matters into his own hands and carried out the work, largely on his own.
But Mr Weir, who filed for bankruptcy in April this year, proved increasingly unreliable to the point where Mr Murfit picked up tools and materials to go ahead with the barn conversion at the same time as he was trying to help 24 of his students prepare for their GCSE maths exams this summer.
Mr Murfit said: “You go through a lot of emotional states, from the initial anger of having paid out money that we can’t get back to wanting retribution for everything that has gone on.
“But in the end, my thought was that we’re not going to have something that my dad can’t use, having paid out all that money for labour and materials to have it done.
“So I watched a lot of videos to find out how to do a barn conversion and, in the end, the only things I didn’t do myself was test the electrics, check the gas work and do the plaster work.”
Mr Murfit started the building work on the same day as his school broke up for the autumn term in December.
From the night of Tuesday, December 19, 2017, until the Tuesday of last week, Mr Murfit had combined eight-hour days at school, with about six hours of construction work every night.
On top of that were his studies for a maths and IT degree with the Open University, helping his son with GCSE work and health issues, the death in the family of his son’s friend and a legal dispute with Mr Weir.
Mr Murfit said: “I’d done a carpentry apprenticeship in the late 1980s, but that was the only hands-on construction experience I had.
“Yet the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it until I got to the point where I just wanted the barn conversion done.
“I look back on it now and ask myself ‘How did I fit everything in?’
“But I’m glad the job has been done the way it has because I know it’s been done right.”
