Joiner in South Liverpool

Woolton is built of the sandstone it was quarried from, and the older houses there have the thick walls and deep window reveals that go with it. Allerton, Mossley Hill and Aigburth have the large Victorian and Edwardian villas and semis: tall ceilings, bay windows with shutters, wide landings and staircases that were made to be looked at.

The scale changes the joinery. A fitted wardrobe in a Mossley Hill bedroom is a wall of furniture, not a cupboard, and the proportions have to be drawn before anything is cut. Skirting is deep, architrave is wide and both are profiles you match rather than buy.

Many of these houses were flats at some point between the sixties and the nineties and have been turned back into single dwellings since. That history is the thing to look for: openings blocked and reopened, a staircase with a partition scar down one side, two different skirting profiles meeting in a hallway.

Childwall, parts of Allerton and the roads around Gateacre are interwar semis and detached on good plots, with the standard bay, the alcoves and the picture rail. The work here is the everyday list: kitchens, wardrobes, doors, flooring and understairs.

These are the easiest houses in Liverpool to work in. Drives, side access, regular openings and rooms that are a sensible size for fitted furniture.

Towards Garston, Hunts Cross and Speke the stock turns postwar and estate-built, with solid ground floors and standard openings. The work is straightforward and predictable, and because the house types repeat, a job done once is quick to price the second time.

Solid floors here are worth the same moisture check we do on the low-lying Wirral estates before wood flooring goes down.