Joiner in North Liverpool and Sefton

Waterloo and the roads behind the front at Crosby are Victorian, built when this was where Liverpool merchants moved to get out of the smoke. Blundellsands has the largest of them. These are houses with tall ceilings, bays with shutters, moulded cornices and staircases that run three storeys with the original balustrade still in place.

Most of the work is conservation-minded: match what is there, repair rather than replace, and put back what a 1970s or 1980s conversion took out. It is slower than fitting new and it is usually what the house deserves.

The front at Crosby and Waterloo takes weather straight off the Mersey mouth, and the exposed elevations show it in the external joinery first.

Bootle and Litherland are terraced and tightly packed, with a lot of housing that has been refurbished repeatedly and cheaply. The practical issues are familiar from Tranmere and New Ferry: out-of-square openings, over-boarded skirting, linings packed with hardboard, and staircases with a creak in most treads.

This is list work. A half day or a day with a written list gets through far more than a series of separate call-outs, and it is better value for the householder.

Formby is a mix of large detached on the pinewood side and more ordinary postwar housing inland, and Maghull is largely postwar and later. Both are straightforward to work in: parking, access, regular openings and rooms that suit fitted furniture.

Formby's sand is the one local factor, and it behaves exactly as it does on the north Wirral coast: under the thresholds, holding damp against anything timber near a door.

There is one more thing worth knowing about the older Crosby and Waterloo houses: a great many were given replacement windows in the eighties and nineties, and where that was done badly the window board and the reveal lining were cut about to make the new frame fit. It is usually invisible until something is taken off, and it is the most common reason a straightforward-looking job in those houses turns out to need a bit more work.