NHBC Awards North East & Yorkshire

Paul ‘over the moon’ at his first NHBC win

NHBC - Cedar parkSite Manager Paul Coates said that he was ‘over the moon’ at winning his first NHBC award, for the Ben Bailey Cedar Park development near Pontefract, Yorkshire.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said modestly, clearly thrilled to have received such an accolade. He revealed that he was very pleased with how the project had run: “It ran pretty smoothly believe it or not: we built fifty five dwellings in twelve months.”

He put the achievement down to having a clear focus from the very start, which allowed him to lead his team – whom he also reported to be delighted at the win – directly to success. He said: “I had the same team on site from start to finish, so they knew from the start what level of quality I wanted out of them. We had that quality straight from day one.”

He also enjoyed celebrating the ability of his team to rise to the challenge, telling us: ‘We would have had a party on site but the work on site is completely finished now so I took them out for a drink.”

The development contains fifty-five units in a mixture of two and three-bedroom semidetached and terrace houses along Featherstone lane, priced from £110,000. It is in a very desirable location, with views of the open countryside and the golf course in the distance. It is also very well-connected in terms of road and rail links into Pontefract and Leeds, and is therefore an ideal development for commuters. This, when combined with the quality of work by Paul and his team, means that the all the dwellings are already sold and lived in.

The £134,950 three-bedroom terrace home features an open plan living/dining room and a generous kitchen, along with three bedrooms and family bathroom. The houses also come with a ten-year NHBC warranty.

Paul Coates has been in the construction industry for thirty-one years, with only a short spell in other work, since leaving school in his teens. He initially started out as an apprentice bricklayer, however he commented that he soon got bored of it, and thought that the groundwork his friends were training in looked like the job he really wanted. He switched, and was subsequently a groundworker for twelve years. When the eighties proved tough on the construction industry, Paul temporarily had to find work elsewhere, but soon got back into the industry as Assistant and then Site Manager for Ben Bailey, the company he has been with for his whole career.

Looking towards the future, Paul is hoping to continue his success by winning more recognition from the NHBC.

 

 

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