Joiner in Liverpool

Most of our city-centre work is commercial. Office floors get reconfigured on a cycle that has nothing to do with the state of the joinery and everything to do with leases, so there is a steady run of partitions going in, partitions coming out, benching and workstation runs being fitted, and boxing in being done before the decorator arrives.

The converted warehouse stock around the Ropewalks and the Baltic Triangle is its own discipline. Those buildings have cast iron or steel columns on a grid, timber floors that have moved over a century and a half, and no two bays exactly alike. Nothing is plumb, nothing is square, and anything that is going to look right has to be scribed to the building rather than built to a drawing and forced in.

Working in an occupied building in the centre also means the practical stuff decides the programme: a goods lift that will not take a three-metre length, a loading window measured in minutes, and a service corridor you are sharing with everybody else on site. We sort that out before the first delivery.

Around Canning, Falkner Square and the streets off Hope Street the houses are Georgian and early Victorian, often listed, usually tall and frequently split into flats at some point. The joinery in them is the best in the city: six-panel doors, deep moulded architrave, shutters in the reveals and staircases that run four floors.

Work there is repair and matching, and it is slow by nature. A listed building can need consent for things people assume are internal, and we will say when we think something does rather than start and find out.

We come through the tunnel, so an early start matters: in before the traffic builds, out after it drops, or a full day on site either way. For commercial work that is planned into the programme.

Parking in the centre is a cost rather than a problem, and on most commercial jobs the client or the contractor sorts the access. For domestic work in the Georgian Quarter and the inner districts it is permit streets and a carry, which goes into the price honestly.