Joiner in Birkenhead

Oxton village and the roads around it are a conservation area, and the houses are large Victorian and some Georgian, with the full set: moulded skirting at a height you cannot buy, four and six panel doors, shutters in the bay windows, and staircases with heavy turned newels. In Claughton the same period runs a bit later and a bit plainer, but the scale is still there.

Almost all of our work in these houses is matching. If a door has to be replaced, the new one has to carry the same panel proportions as the others on the landing or the whole landing looks wrong. Running a new length of skirting to match a Victorian profile is a day's work before it is fitted, and it is the difference between a repair that disappears and one you notice every time you walk past it.

Shutters are worth mentioning on their own. A lot of Oxton bays still have the original folding shutters boxed into the reveal, painted shut decades ago. Freeing them off and getting them working again is slow, careful work rather than a replacement job, and it is almost always worth doing.

Down towards Tranmere and Rock Ferry the stock is terraced and the issues are different: settlement, previous conversions, and a lot of work done cheaply in the eighties and nineties that is now failing. Door linings out of square, staircases with a creak in every third tread, and skirting that has been over-boarded rather than replaced.

This is where a half day with a list is far better value than a single call-out. Most of what is wrong in these houses is small, fixable and has been annoying somebody for years.

Birkenhead town centre and the business space around it is a steady source of commercial work: offices being reconfigured, units turned round between tenants, and training rooms fitted out. It is close enough to Moreton that we can be on site early and work a full day without travel eating into it.

Access in the town is the usual town-centre picture: loading windows, limited parking and sometimes a lift that will not take a three-metre length. We work that out before the first delivery rather than on the morning.