Full-House Renovations

Renovating a whole house is really a sequencing problem. Do it as a string of separate trades you book and chase yourself and it drags, the trades trip over each other, and the finish ends up a patchwork. Run it as one coordinated job and it flows — each trade following the last cleanly, one finish level across the house, one person you can ring.

That's what we do. We're a family-run team in Blackburn, and on a full-house refit we plan the order of works, bring in and coordinate the trades, and run it room by room so the place comes together as a whole rather than in mismatched phases. You choose the kitchen, the suites, the finishes; we fit them and everything around them.

A whole-house job usually rolls our room work into one programme: the kitchen and the bathrooms fitted alongside everything else, fitted bedroom storage where it's wanted, plus the work that ties it all together — plastering, flooring, joinery, decoration and finishing throughout. Doing it together means it's all to one standard and one schedule, not a kitchen from this year next to a bathroom from five years ago. You can see the kind of finish on our Belthorn cottage living-room renovation and the Blackburn living-room refurbishment.

It's worth being clear about where we stop. We're a refit and fitting firm: we don't do structural alterations, knock-throughs, extensions or the building-control sign-off that goes with them, and we don't act as a main contractor on a structural build. That's a specialist route. Plenty of full-house jobs don't need any of it — they're a top-to-bottom refit within the existing layout. Where a job does want a wall moved or a space opened up, we'll tell you straight, point you to the right people for that part, and coordinate our refit around it once the structure's settled. You always know who's responsible for what.

Most people can't move out for a full renovation, so we phase the work around the house being lived in wherever we can — keeping a usable kitchen or bathroom going as long as possible, doing the messiest, dustiest work (strip-out, plastering) in a concentrated stretch, and protecting the routes through. You get a realistic schedule before we start, broken down by area, so you know which room is out of action when and can plan around it.

On a job this size, the single biggest thing that goes wrong elsewhere is nobody being in charge of the whole. With us, one of us — Paul or Martyn — runs your project day to day: the same person from the first walk-round to the final snag, coordinating the trades so the next is never left waiting, and giving you a straight answer whenever you want one. No project-management layer to pay for, no site you can't get hold of. It's part of our wider whole-home renovation work across Blackburn, Darwen and East Lancashire.