Specialist Small Works Department
Our Specialist Small Works Department is able to provide traditional expert skills to carry out works typically costing under £100,000 and where a full site management process is not warranted. An essential and complementary part of our business, the Department enables us to offer a full range of services to our valued clients and we are proud of the long-term relationships we have developed with many of them.
Although these are smaller contracts, we take the same rigorous approach to 'health and safety'. Smaller projects have different, but no less critical, safety risks to larger contracts.
David Walters, our Special Projects Manager, oversees all of our specialist works. Our approach is to ensure that we give a personal service by working closely with the client throughout the project ensuring we meet their specific needs. By having a full understanding of our clients' needs, we ensure the project is properly planned and that we reduce the risk of major problems due to later changes to the specification. The day-to-day management of the project is carried out our by Keith Brown, our Special Works Supervisor.
Our directly employed tradesmen have both a breadth of specialist skills and long experience, allowing us to use the most appropriate team for any project. They regularly attend specialist courses on subjects as lime mortar, historical timber repairs, working with listed buildings etc sponsored by Essex County Council and English Heritage. This enables clients to have confidence in both the professionalism and integrity of the staff working on their projects.
To give the best service to our clients, we usually ask that residential premises in which we are carrying out major work are unoccupied. We are delighted to have worked with many of our clients over a number of years and we greatly value these long-standing relationships. For such clients we do not have a minimum size of job.
Using our in-house joinery shop, we are to provide superbly crafted woodwork with efficient turnaround times. We always work with specialist professionals such as structural engineers and architects to enable practical solutions to be found for our clients' projects.
Typical Specialist Small Works projects includes:
Rural estate management
We maintain and renovate buildings where a client may have a number of properties on an estate or in a portfolio, such as the complete rewiring of four houses on an estate.
Listed buildings and period properties
Works to period properties (including listed Grade 2*) include:
Traditional
Projects include enabling works, office conversions, repairs to farm buildings and smaller repairs to large properties where we have originally undertaken more extensive work.
Commercial
We undertake a variety of commercial projects. Such projects frequently involve co-ordination of specialist mechanical and electrical services and the need to allow businesses to operate unaffected by the building operations. We have worked for a number of owner-managers of businesses who rely on our professional approach from the planning process to final delivery of the project and need this expertise on both smaller projects as well as larger contracts.
Public sector
We work extensively in the public sector and the Specialist Small Works Department is able to undertake smaller projects in this sector.
On-going maintenance of specialist buildings
Following completion of a project we are often asked by our most valued clients to look after its maintenance or to repair other buildings under their care. We are able to offer 'out of hours cover' and are always available by phone. Typically, when a timber barn was in danger of collapsing after a storm during the last Christmas shut-down, we were able to carry out immediate repairs.
We provide routine planned maintenance for a number of churches thus preventing more serious problems to develop.
Typical work includes:
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Cleaning of gutters, valleys and down pipes
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General roof repairs
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General carpentry works
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Glazing
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Brickwork
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Clearance of vegetation from the exterior walls and foundations.
We are very pleased to support the 'Inspired!' campaign by English Heritage to address the problems of neglect of maintenance which so often leads to costly long-term problems.
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