Unprofessional is not enough
We employed John Sharples to do the drawings for our basement conversion, apply to Building Control and Planning, and to project manager the works. We signed a contract with him in January 2020, and made it very clear that all work needed to be completed before May 2021.
The drawings and application to building control and planning should have taken no more than three months even during coronavirus. The council departments did not shut down. John spent one year and 3 months to do it. This is unacceptable
He didn't keep us updated with his progress of his work at any time (basically because he procrastinated and didn't do anything for months). We always had to chase him. He ignored our messages and calls for months, even when we explained my partner was becoming very sick with the stress of this situation and the pressure of not knowing if we could do the work before the deadline, our finances would be badly affected.
After the odyssey been working with John in March of 2021 we finally received finally the drawings, unfortunately the huge delay he created has made it impossible for any builders to schedule to complete the work on time. At the moment working with John cost us a year of delay, and extra money in the thousands.
John Sharples claims to be able to project-manage building work, but he is not able to manage his own workload and maintain basic stakeholder engagement. He is not reliable (he repeatedly lied about his deadlines, and did not contact us to say he would not meet them and we would have to chase him again - for weeks - to get an answer); he is not able to cope with even basic new technology needed to do his job properly (he didn't know how to transform documents into the standard compatible format to get accepted by the council, he also couldn´t turn his documents into PDFs (!) we had to take the paper documents and convert them ourselves); the lack of communication with us throughout was insulting (his attitude when we ask him why he had not finished the work was pathetic. He tried to explain that he didn't want to waste time answering the phone and that it was our calls that were delaying him!)
I regret every second we trusted in him, and wholeheartedly recommend that you find an alternative person to work with on your project.