Melbourne tradie rips up tiles in rooftop protest claiming he wasn’t paid for this work
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Strange moment, irate tradie starts smashing tiles at rooftop protest claiming he hasn’t been paid for work he did: ‘Get off the roof’
- Chaotic disagreement between trades over unpaid invoices
- Roofer claimed he waited eight months for payment
- He then ripped his work from the house, angering the builder.
A vengeful Australian tradie scaled the roof of a house he had shingled on only to have them ripped off due to a bitter pay dispute.
Simon McPherson’s bizarre protest, at a house in Hadfield, North Melbourne, was met with an expletive-laden tirade from the irate builder he shingled for, Adrian Padoin.
Footage filmed by one of McPherson’s employees showed Padoin standing below with a sledgehammer as tiles from the house fell to the ground.
Simon McPherson explains why he scaled the house he tiled eight months earlier just to rip them off over a bill dispute
“Hey, get off the fucking roof,” Padoin yells, in footage played on a current affair on Wednesday.
‘Come here so I can crush you, you fucking idiot.
‘How did you get in the house, dog?’
Mr. McPherson replied: ‘I’ll get off the roof when I break it mate.’
“Pay your fucking bills,” the tile adds multiple times during footage of the chaotic disagreement.
Ms. Padoin turns to the worker filming and is told the same thing: ‘Pay the bill, we’ll fix it.’
McPherson claims that he billed Padoin $6,994 for the mosaic work in May 2022 and only received a deposit.
‘Everything [he said] it was ‘I’ll pay this week, I have money coming in’, this, that’.
McPherson said he kept getting excuses about late pay for months, so he started threatening to tear up work that didn’t get paid.
“I even told him a couple of times that I was going out and he didn’t believe me.
‘you outdo yourself [not being paid].
“There’s a lot going on in this industry and there’s no one that’s going to do anything about it.”
Mr McPherson claims that the official arbitrator for such disputes, VCAT, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Court, was “too expensive”.
Instead, he preferred his own solution: remove the tiles he had laid eight months earlier, because he felt they still belonged to him.
The irate bricklayer, Mr. Padoin, watches helplessly as the tiler he was working with tears up his work.
In footage filmed by Mr. McPherson’s co-worker, shingles attached to the Hadfield home were ripped off and thrown to the ground in protest. In the photo, tiling in progress in a different house
Back on the ground, Mr. Padoin grew increasingly angry as he watched the broken tiles fall.
‘You’re going to get hit in the mouth as soon as you get down,’ the builder yelled.
Both men claim to have called the police and although they are not shown arriving, ACA said they did come but ‘no action was taken’ against either.
Mr. Padoin stated that no matter what damage has been done to the house, “at the end of the day I will fix it.” [but] you will not receive your money.
He also claimed that Mr. McPherson should have been more patient because he was about to pay off his debt, “probably within a week or two”.
Now he has no money.
He called Mr. McPherson’s rooftop protest “a spiteful act” and acknowledged that the whole situation did not reflect well on him.
But I think it will look worse on him.