West Sussex

Billingshurst builders and joiners. Two villages, one name.

Tom Tennant is a builder and joiner working in Billingshurst, from a base seven miles south at Washington. Two kinds of house here need two different trades, and this is what each one asks for.

There is finished work in Billingshurst, photographed and set out below: a roof renovation where a trussed roof with no bracing in it at all had leaned far enough to push its brick gable out of plumb. That is the claim this page makes. It is not a radius drawn on a map.

Seven miles is a short distance to return over, and that is the whole of what proximity buys anybody. It does not make the work better. What decides the work here is something else, and it is particular to this village.

Builders and carpenters in Billingshurst, working from Washington: house renovation, extensions and loft conversions, hand cut and trussed roofs, oak frame work, bespoke kitchens in Billingshurst and fitted wardrobes and joinery — and the same range wherever else we cover.

Building and joinery work in Billingshurst

A long single-storey outbuilding with a garage door, finished: the whole roof re-tiled in its original plain clay tiles, white fascias and a brick gable end, under a clear blue sky.

Roof renovation, Billingshurst

Billingshurst

A trussed roof in Billingshurst that had moved for want of any bracing, pushing its brick gable 150mm out of plumb, taken apart and put back with the original tiles.

Two villages, two different building jobs

Billingshurst is really two housing stocks wearing one name, and they ask for opposite things.

At one end there is the old village: a High Street of sixteenth and seventeenth-century timber-framed houses, almost all of them refronted, under plain tile or Horsham stone slabs. At the other there are forty years of estates and, since 2016, another five hundred and fifty homes approved — Billingshurst has grown from 6,531 people in 2001 to 9,127 at the last census.

A wardrobe run in a 2019 house is a different job from a wardrobe run in a 1650 one. In the new stock the walls are plumb, the floors are level, the studs are where the drawing says, and the work is about the cabinetry itself. In the old stock nothing is true, nothing is where it looks, and half the job is finding out what you are actually fixing to. Both are ordinary work. They are not the same work, and a quotation that treats them as the same is guessing at one of them. The in-frame kitchen at Storrington, seven miles south, is the old-stock version of that problem worked through.

Extensions and loft conversions on the newer estates

A house on one of the estates is straightforward to work in, and that is the point. Very little has to be discovered before it can be priced.

What decides an extension or a loft conversion there is the roof rather than the fabric. If it is trussed — light timbers in a W, braced to work as one structure rather than as separate rafters — the webs cannot simply be cut away to make a room. Two things have to be settled before anything is drawn: what holds the roof up once they are gone, and what carries the new floor. Both are roof carpentry questions before they are joinery ones, and the answers decide whether the room is worth having at all.

What “refronted” means, and why it decides the fixings

A refronted house is one whose timber frame is older than its face. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was fashionable here to put a brick front on a timber-framed building, and the listed building records for Billingshurst say so repeatedly: numbers 21, 23 and 25 High Street in red brick with grey headers, numbers 17, 19 and 27 in painted brick with tile-hanging above, all over frames from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The consequence is practical and it is the same on every one of them. A run of tall units goes into brick at waist height and into oak, or into batten and a cavity, or into nothing at all, a foot higher. Tile-hanging sits proud of its own void. A fixing that feels solid may be biting into a batten with air behind it. So the cabinet is scribed to what the wall does and fixed to what is actually there, and both are found out before anything is cut rather than after.

Horsham stone slabs are a stone roof, not a tile roof

A Horsham slab is a sandstone flag, laid in diminishing courses, and it weighs several times what a plain clay tile weighs over the same area. It is named for the town seven miles up the road, where the quarries were and where one still works. They are on roofs all over the older part of Billingshurst and are named in the conservation area’s own appraisal as a feature to preserve.

That weight is the point. A roof built to carry stone was never designed to be cut into, so putting a dormer or a rooflight through one is a structural question first and a joinery question second. The honest answer on some of them is that the opening should go somewhere else.

Billingshurst’s conservation area, and the boundary that runs through gardens

The conservation area covers the historic core rather than the village as a whole, and its boundary does not follow the road. In places it runs through gardens, so two neighbours can sit under different rules with nothing on the ground to show it.

So it is worth settling before a garden building, an extension or a new opening is designed. Which side of that line a house falls on decides the scope, not the wording, and finding out is a look at a map.