Here we undertook a complete refurbishment of the property, working with the customer to provide them with their perfect home.
Structural load bearing wall removal
Non load bearing wall removal
Ground floor suspended floor insulation and new floorboards
New sliding pocket doors
Replacement of ceilings and acoustic insulation installed to ground and first floor
Damp issues rectified
Alteration to first floor room configuration
En-suit bathrooms
Bespoke joinery
New plaster throughout
New skirting throughout
Complete decoration internal and external
New kitchen by Hamilton Stone Design
We chose Lewis over 2 other possible contractors, mostly because he was the quickest to come back with an estimate and he had the most precise and detailed estimate for the work (2 pages with at least 30 items in total), which showed he cared about understanding the needs and responding as adequately as possible. He has a good system for making quotations (for comparison, another contractor sent us a letter with 5 lines of blurb and a 1 number)
Lewis and his team worked on our house for 9 months for a major renovation undertaking. The last two months we were actually living there. We know him well now. They also came back the following year for two other projects (each lasting several weeks).
Across those projects they did everything: breaking walls, installing steel beams, floors ceilings, woodwork, news walls, painting, wood flooring, tiling, roof repairs, gutters and fascias.. and he brought in partners for electrics, plumbing and plastering.
Frankly they did an amazing job for such a small team. We did like the fact that it was a small team of trustworthy workers who care about the quality of the work rather than a larger team of people who try to do things quickly.
We're very happy with the quality of the work that was done. Lewis is serious, dedicated, punctual etc.. and spent so much time with us that it felt almost as if he was part of the family at some point (at least that's how my 3 year old felt)!
Communication was very effective over phone, email and sms and Lewis is very responsive.
Budget-wise it came out much higher than initially planned but that's not his fault: the job ended up much larger than anticipated because we chose not to take any short cuts or make any compromise and we chose to do things properly in most situations. It's hard to know if his costing is right (we didn't have experience of such large project before) but it was certainly very transparent (he maintained a very long but very precise list of work items, each with a clear price) and when I did a few spot checks and comparison with online estimates he seemed reasonably priced. He may not be the cheapest guy around, I don't know, but we didn't want the cheapest.
Overall, we have been extremely pleased with Lewis and have tried to get his time every time we needed some more work in the house.
