DOCTOR ON THE HOUSE

Jeff Howell explains the etiquette of buying four by two at the builder's yard

You can buy building materials from four different kinds of retail outlet. Which type you choose can determine quality, price and reliability of advice. There are also unspoken rules about how you ought to behave in each.

First, your traditional big builder's yard. Lots of account customers. May be impatient with amateurs. This is partly because the account customers are in there buying 7,000 quid's worth of stuff, and you're in the same queue with a paintbrush and a packet of hooks. But it may also be because the blokes behind the counter do not know any more about building than you do. If you want stuff from the yard, cement or bricks, say, you have to get it from the yard man first, who will give you a ticket to take to the counter. Finding him can be a problem: he is often hiding in the toilets waiting for the minimum wage to be introduced.

Second, small high street concerns, often run by Asians. Polite, friendly, good with advice, stock a bit of everything and open all hours but not especially cheap. If you want stuff on Sundays and bank holidays, which most of us do, they are head and shoulders above DIY superstores. If you live near an Orthodox Jewish area you may be able to find a builder's merchant open on Sunday and have the privilege of dealing with a yard man wearing a bowler hat and waistcoat. The protocol in most of these is that you pay for everything at the counter first, get your receipt, and then look for the yard man. He won't be hiding because he's probably got a stake in the business.

Third, DIY superstores. Only if you're really desperate at eight in the evening. High prices and no one knows anything about anything. Net consumers of time, money and energy. Ghastly.

Last, but by no means least, are the specialist merchants. Electrical suppliers will stock 20 different types of sockets, switches, cable, etc, and will know which are the right ones for the job. Same with plumbers' merchants, decorating suppliers, timber yards, architectural ironmongers. They are often stunningly cheaper than other outlets - I recently bought an electric shower for pounds 60 from my local electrical suppliers, half the price of anywhere else. In the boom times of the Eighties specialists sometimes only wanted trade account customers. Some had signs up saying things like "pounds 50 minimum". But those days are gone. Like cab drivers, they now realise that your money is as good as anyone else's.

To get trade prices, you are supposed to be "in the trade". Don't be shy. Make up a company name if they ask for one. After all, you're doing up your house. Well then, you're a property developer.

Oh, by the way, don't ever be tempted to jump the queue at the counter in a builders' merchants, the way you might try to do, say, at a bar of a crowded pub. There are some wild men in the building game. You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of of them.