Carpenter and Joiner in Warlingham (CR6)
Warlingham is a village of two halves and the joinery follows suit. Near the centre there are period cottages where the detail and the matching decide everything; out towards the edges there are large detached and semi-detached family homes with the rooms to build storage into.
Doors in an older cottage
Doors are the piece of joinery a house gets wrong first.
In an older Warlingham cottage the openings have settled and few of them are square, so a door bought to a standard size and hung as it comes will show a tapering gap down one side. The work is in the frame and in the hanging: reading where the opening has moved, cutting the hinge housings to suit, and easing the door so it swings and latches without being planed away to nothing. Original panelled doors are usually worth keeping and repairing rather than replacing, even when they have been painted over so many times that the mouldings have filled in. Stripping back, repairing splits and rehanging on decent ironmongery gets more out of a room than a new flat door ever will. That door work is our own carpenters', not somebody found for the week. Painting it afterwards is a different trade, so the decorator comes in through us and is run by us.
Storage in the family houses
Push out from the village centre and the houses change: large detached and semi-detached family homes with the room to plan storage in properly. Fitted wardrobes make a real difference in those rooms because they use the full height to the ceiling, which no freestanding wardrobe does, and because they can be planned around the window, the radiator and the door swing rather than fighting all three. The same applies downstairs, where built-in storage across an alcove or a whole wall takes the clutter out of a room without eating floor space. Each run is set out from the room as it stands, which is why it is measured in place rather than ordered to a size.
New work that agrees with the old
Whichever end of Warlingham a house sits in, new joinery has to agree with the old.
That means matching the skirting and architrave profile where new work meets an existing run, keeping door heights and handle heights consistent through a floor, and using the same timber sections rather than whatever happens to be nearest. On the older properties it also means repairing where a repair will do. Splicing sound timber into a damaged section is usually better work than replacing a whole piece, and it keeps the original detail in the building rather than in a skip. It is slower work and it asks for a joiner who can match a moulding, which is why it tends to get quoted away by anyone being paid to be quick.
More in Warlingham
Everything we do in Warlingham is on the Warlingham area sheet, and the full detail of how we approach this trade is on the carpentry & joinery page.
Common questions
Q.01Can you keep our original doors?
Usually, yes. Splits, dropped joints and decades of paint are all repairable, and a repaired original door normally suits an older Warlingham cottage more than anything new dropped into the same opening.
Q.02Do fitted wardrobes have to go up to the ceiling?
Not necessarily, but it is normally the reason to have them fitted. The space above a freestanding wardrobe is the storage most houses waste, and a fitted run takes it back without using more floor.
Q.03Our doors have dropped and catch on the floor. Is that the door or the frame?
More often the hinges or the frame than the door itself. We check where it has moved before taking anything off, because planing the bottom of a door that has simply dropped only moves the problem along.
Q.04Can you work on a conservation-minded street without upsetting the neighbours?
Yes. Deliveries, cutting and waste are planned so they are not spread along the road, and the noisier machining is kept off the finished floors and away from the street where it can be.
Thinking about carpentry & joinery in Warlingham?
Tell us what you are planning. We come out, look at the job properly and give you a price for it.