Services

House renovations, taken back and put right.

Structural carpentry and fitted joinery in houses of any age, from a 1930s semi to a garage conversion to a timber-framed barn — surveyed and quoted by Tom Tennant, and carried out by the team and specialist trades this business has worked with for years.

Renovation is the work where the survey matters most, because almost nothing is where the drawing says it is, and the drawing is usually out of date before it is finished.

Tom works from Washington, and renovation and conversion work runs from there across West Sussex. He surveys the building, draws it and prices it, and stays on it while the team carries out the carpentry and building work. When a wall turns out to be worse than the survey suggested, it is found by someone who was there for the survey, and you hear about it directly rather than from somebody relaying a site report.

How small a job will you take on — and how large?

A weather-damaged door is a job. So is a whole building.

A door. A back door that had simply had enough of the weather, replaced in oak to the pattern of the door before it — four panes over a boarded panel, a cat flap back in the panel, and the same black ironwork in the same places on the face. That was the entire job.
A garage conversion. At Albourne a garage conversion turned part of a garage into a bedroom and a wet room built for wheelchair access, with the rest of the garage left working as a garage.
A barn conversion. At Pulborough a barn conversion took an old storage barn back to its frame and made it a two-bedroom annexe.

What does not change between the two is the order of the work. The building is surveyed, what is structural is settled before anything cosmetic is decided, and the joinery is made to fit what is actually there. A door and a barn differ in how long that takes, not in how it is done.

The barn saved from ruin at Pulborough, finished in black feather-edge cladding and seen from the end: a hipped roof of corrugated tin over it, the whole building standing on a rebuilt stone and brick plinth, with bare ground, stacked blocks and broken tile still round the base. — The other Pulborough barn: saved, not converted

What does opening up actually find?

Something that is not on the drawing. That is true of a 1930s semi where the lath and plaster comes off a chimney breast, a 1970s house where a stud wall turns out to have been doing more than partitioning, and a timber-framed barn where the boarding comes off the frame.

Houses get altered, and the alterations rarely get recorded. A wall that looks structural is sometimes a later partition. A wall that looks like a partition is sometimes carrying a purlin. Floors have been lifted and relaid, joist ends have sat in damp brickwork for decades, and something has almost always been changed by somebody who did not write it down.

None of it is a problem. It is information, and it is far better found on the survey than three weeks in.

What does the age of the house actually change?

Quite a lot, because houses of different decades are built out of different things. The work is the same trade; what it meets behind the plaster is not.

A 1930s house. The chimney breast is worth naming on its own. It often no longer carries a fire, but it usually still carries the stack above it, running up through a bedroom and out through the roof. Take the breast out downstairs and something has to pick up what it was holding — a beam, sometimes on gallows brackets bolted either side of the stack, sized from an engineer’s calculation to the load above rather than guessed at. Walls are commonly solid rather than cavity, and the internal ones are lath and plaster rather than board.

A 1950s or 1960s house. Not automatically solid brick just because it looks it. Materials were short after the war and a good number of houses from this period were built by non-traditional methods — a steel or concrete frame with a masonry or panel skin, sometimes a frame under render. The wall that looks structural from the living room can be a panel doing very little, and the one that looks like nothing can be carrying the frame. That is found out on the survey, not assumed from the brick pattern.

A 1970s or 1980s house. By now the external wall is almost always two skins with a cavity between them, tied together, both doing a job. Cut an opening through it and both leaves have to be carried, normally by a single cavity lintel shaped to span the pair of them with the tray built into it, so water running down the cavity still drains out rather than into the room. It is sized from a manufacturer’s span table, or on a wider opening from an engineer’s calculation. What is wrong here is a solid-wall beam dropped in as though there were no cavity: it carries the inner leaf, leaves the outer one and the water in the cavity unresolved, and the damp turns up inside months later.

A 1990s house or newer. More likely to be framed in engineered timber than sawn: I-joists or posi-joists in the floors, factory-made trusses in the roof, each calculated to do its job and no more. That changes what can be done to it. A solid joist has zones it can be notched and drilled in — top-edge notches in the first quarter of the span, holes on the centre line — and there is a fair amount of room in them. An engineered one has zones the manufacturer allows you to drill and zones that are never touched, because cut in the wrong place it stops doing the sum it was built to do.

A dormer window built into an old clay tiled roof: two casements with glazing bars in a grey-blue painted frame, boarded cheeks under a small pitched roof, lead dressed down the side, and weathered handmade tiles running away on both slopes. — A dormer detailed into an old tiled roof

What happens when it changes the price?

This is the fear, and it deserves a mechanism rather than a promise.

The written quotation covers a scope. Where opening up changes that scope — a joist end gone, a wall that turns out to be doing a job nobody expected — the change is priced before the work happens, not added at the end. You get the choice while it is still a choice.

Nobody can say a house will hold no surprises. What can be said is how one is handled: it comes to you as a conversation and a figure, in that order.

Why structure comes first

Steels and new timber structure go in before anything cosmetic. Floors are set out so they are level and quiet. Openings are formed and trimmed properly rather than packed out afterwards.

The reason is money as much as order. Anything finished before the structure is settled is at risk of being taken apart again. Fitted joinery scribed to a wall that later moves is a wasted week and a wasted material bill.

On a renovation the steel is usually there because something is coming out, not because something new is being spanned. A wall between two rooms, or a chimney breast off a stack that is still standing above it: what it was carrying has to be picked up before it goes, needled and propped while the beam goes in, and the order of that is as much of the job as the beam is. Where a new floor has to be spanned instead, that is set out on the extensions and loft conversions page.

Can an oak frame be repaired rather than replaced?

This is a question a 1930s semi never asks, because it has no frame to expose. It is exactly the question a building like the Pulborough barn does ask, and it is worth setting out for the buildings where it applies.

Often it can, and where it can it is the better answer. An oak frame fails locally rather than all at once. A sole plate rots where it has sat against damp ground while the post above it is sound. A beam end goes where a leak has run down it for years while the rest of the beam is fine.

The repair is to cut out what has gone and let in new timber — a scarf joint on a beam, a new length of sole plate under the posts — so the frame keeps its history and only the failed part is new. That is carpentry rather than demolition, and it is the difference between a converted building and a new building with old timbers in it.

The same logic decides what goes back around the frame. A wall like that was built to move and to let moisture out through its surface. Seal that surface with something modern and hard and the moisture has nowhere to go but into the timber it is sitting against, which is why the panels between the studs on the barn are filled with a soft, permeable plaster rather than a cement render, and the boarding outside is oak rather than a modern board that would have to be sealed to survive.

A room with the timber frame exposed on every wall and pale plaster panels filled flush between the studs. — Panels filled between the studs

What the joinery has to do when the building is not square

Joinery is made square, because square is what makes a door hang and a drawer run. Very few houses are, and it is not only the old ones — a 1930s semi has settled, a 1960s house has moved at its openings, and a newer house is square enough to flatter a tape and still not square enough to fit to.

So the difference is taken up in the fitting rather than argued with. Linings are scribed to what is actually there. Openings are set out from the wall as it stands rather than from a drawing of where it was meant to stand. A stair is set out from the opening it has to land in.

On a timber frame there is one extra wrinkle: new oak and old oak are not the same material. The new is pale and will darken and silver over years, and the old has already done it. Details have to look deliberate for the whole of that time, not just on the day they go in.

A pair of oak casements with black iron hinges and a curled latch, set into a deep opening in an old timber frame. — New oak, set into old timber

Can you live in it while the work happens?

Sometimes, and the honest answer depends on the building.

Most house renovations happen around a family that has not moved out. The route through the house is protected, the site is swept at the end of the day, and the work is sequenced so the house stays usable — which costs time and is worth it.

A building being converted is usually a different case. An empty barn can be worked on in the order that suits the structure rather than the order that keeps a kitchen usable, and that shows in the finish. It is worth knowing which of the two you are buying.

What happens before the first wall comes down

Survey first, on the building as it is. Then drawings, and a structural engineer’s calculations where the structure needs them. Then a written quotation, with a scope stated in it.

Some buildings will not repay what they would cost to put right. That is better heard at the survey than a month in, and it is said plainly when it is true.

Work of this kind

Renovation and conversion work

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.

A sage green shaker kitchen in an L round two walls, with a white worktop, chrome bar handles, open oak shelves between the wall cabinets, a chimney extractor over an induction hob and a herringbone floor running through.

Kitchen and oak doors, Worthing

Worthing

A sage green shaker kitchen in Worthing, designed and fitted by Tennant, with a new doorway formed into the room and oak glazed doors hung through the rest of the house.

The finished wet room: large white tiles to half height with bare plaster above, a close-coupled toilet, a corner basin unit, and a frameless glass screen standing on a tiled floor that runs level and unbroken beneath it.

Garage conversion, Albourne

Albourne

Part of a garage in Albourne turned into a bedroom and a wet room built for wheelchair access, with the rest of the garage left working as a garage.

The finished barn: black feather-edge cladding over a rebuilt stone and brick plinth, under a hipped roof of corrugated tin, standing in grass at the edge of a wood.

A barn saved from ruin, Pulborough

Pulborough

A timber-framed barn taken back from collapse: the roof stripped to lighten it, the building jacked back to its original height, new base plates and posts let into the old oak frame, the stone walls rebuilt, and a tin roof chosen so it can come off again.

The finished annexe from the garden: new oak cladding beginning to silver under the old clay-tiled roof, a rooflight in the slope, with deep planting and a pergola in front of it.

Barn conversion, Pulborough

Pulborough

An old storage barn converted into a two-bedroom annexe with a bathroom: new oak cladding outside, fully insulated, and oak windows, doors, stair and floors made and fitted to a frame that was left on show.

A rebuilt oak well house: four braced posts on a new boarded oak deck carrying a pitched roof of hand made clay tiles, with the original chain roller and bucket hanging beneath it.

Well house restoration, Rusper

Rusper

A rotten well house rebuilt to match the original: air dried oak frame, softwood rafters, the building's own hand made clay tiles put back, and the original gear for lowering the bucket kept and reused.

A new pale oak back door hung in an old brick opening, four glazed panes over a boarded panel with a small cat flap low in it, sloped boards under the glazing and across the foot, and a black iron handle, boss and keyhole plate on the stile.

Oak back door to the old door's pattern, Horsham

Horsham

A dark, weather-worn timber back door replaced with a new oak one made to the same pattern, with the same black ironwork on the face and a cat flap back in the boarded panel.

Often alongside

Hand Cut Roofs & Trussed Roofs

Hand cut roofs set out on the building as it measures, trussed roofs fixed and braced, and the openings trimmed through either.

Oak Frame Structures

Oak framed entrance porches, oak porch screens and doors, the rebuild of a well house, and oak frame repair across West Sussex: mortice-and-tenon joints, pegged, left bare to silver.

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