Houses that have moved, and work cut to suit.

West Sussex is not one kind of house. There is the Weald, where the older stock is timber-framed and the frame is still doing the work behind the plaster. There is the Downland edge, flint and brick, walls a couple of feet thick and none of them plumb. And there is everything built since the war, square on the drawing and near enough square in fact.

The first two decide how a job gets built.

Tennant Carpentry & Building are builders and carpenters across West Sussex, working from Washington under the Downs: house renovation and barn conversion, extensions and loft conversions in West Sussex, hand cut and trussed roofs, oak frame work, bespoke kitchens and fitted wardrobes and joinery. The towns and villages with a page of their own are listed on the areas page.

Nothing is square, and has not been for a long time

A timber frame moves. It moved when the oak was green, it moved again when the roof was re-laid, and it moved a third time when somebody took out a partition that turned out to be holding something up. Two or three hundred years on you get a room where the floor falls an inch across three metres, the ceiling dips towards the middle, and no two internal corners read the same on a bevel gauge.

Horsham slabs are worth knowing about for the same reason. A stone roof is heavy. Where one is still on, the walls under it have carried that load for centuries, and the wall plate is rarely where it started.

What that means for a kitchen

Off-the-shelf cabinetry is made for a room that does not exist here. It arrives at a fixed height with a scribe rail thin enough for plasterboard, and then a flint and brick return eats forty millimetres of it inside a metre.

An in-frame carcass gives you somewhere to put that difference. The face frame stands proud, so the scribe is cut into the frame and not into the door. A run is levelled off the highest point of the floor and the plinth loses the fall, scribed down to the boards rather than sat on packers. Cornice against a dipping ceiling is cut in sections and eased along, not run in one length and filled. Worktops are templated after the cabinets are set and levelled, never off the drawing.

Tall runs and glazed cabinetry are where an out-of-plumb wall shows first, because a long stile is a straight edge held up against something that is not one. Those get set out in the room before anything is cut.

What it means once the roof is off

A timber-frame first floor on an older house is a survey you cannot finish until you are standing up there. The drawing says the wall plate is level and the existing rafters sit at regular centres. Neither is a safe assumption on a house of that age.

So the joist run, the trimmers around a stairwell or a chimney breast, the noggins, the padstones under a steel beam, all of it gets judged with the structure open and in front of you. That happens under scaffolding and a temporary roof, with the family still living underneath, so the house goes weather-tight at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job.

The kitchen at Storrington and the first floor at Cuckfield are the same county and two entirely different problems.

Newer houses are a different problem, not an easier one

The post-war and later stock is straighter, which helps. But the walls are dot-and-dab plasterboard over blockwork, and a tall run or a wardrobe carcass fixed into the dabs is fixed to very little. Those go back to the block, with the fixings set out before the boards are ever touched.

Rooms in newer houses are also smaller and squarer, which changes what a wardrobe run should be. Full-height doors instead of a top box. A shallower carcass where the door swing would otherwise catch the bed.

One survey, house to house

Whichever house it is, the survey and the drawings are Tom’s, and the making and the fit are carried out by the team working from his numbers. The scribes are cut by the man who measured the wall. Nothing is handed over halfway, and nothing gets explained twice to somebody who was not there the first time.