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A family business, one standard.
Prana Property Care is a small, family-run business working out of Godmanchester. When you ring, you get one of us. When we quote, we are the people who will do the work. And if we come back to put something right, it is a familiar face at the door.
This is Ian
I quote every job on this site and I do most of the work on it. Ring the number at the top and it is me who answers. If something needs putting right in twelve months, it is me at the door.
Behind me there is family, which is why a Room Refresh moves at the pace it does rather than waiting on one diary, and beyond the family a network of specialists for the work that is legally theirs.
I live here, in Godmanchester. That is not a marketing line. It is the reason I would rather lose a job than have somebody two streets away telling people I made a mess of theirs, and it is worth more than any certificate I could put on this page.
A gap we kept falling into ourselves
This started, as these things usually do, with our own houses. Years of looking after them properly, learning which corners cannot be cut, and gradually becoming the family that friends, neighbours and relatives rang when something needed doing. A gate rehung here, a room decorated there, a garden rescued for somebody who could no longer manage it.
What kept striking us was how badly served everybody was. The trades are organised for the trades: a plasterer will not decorate afterwards, a door fitter will not straighten the crooked socket beside the door, and nobody at all wants the list of eleven small things that make a house tiring to live in.
Below that sits the other option, which everyone has a story about. The one who never came back. The one who wanted cash and left a mess. The quote that doubled, the job half finished, the phone that stopped being answered.
We got tired of hearing it, and tired of watching people be let down in their own homes. Prana is the arrangement we always wanted as customers: one insured, guaranteed relationship for the whole list, priced in writing, with a network of registered specialists behind it for the work that belongs with them. So we built it.
One practical thing, since it is the question people are too polite to ask: we hold a Basic DBS check and will show you the certificate whenever you like. We are also fully insured, and happy to evidence that too. Neither is required of a tradesman in this country, which is why we mention them.
Four habits, applied to everything
We listen before we quote
The first tool is not in the van. A walk round, a proper conversation, and a plain view of what needs doing now, what can safely wait, and what is best left alone. Half of what we are paid for is judgement, and judgement starts with paying attention.
We price the job, not the hour
Hourly billing rewards slowness and punishes tidiness. You get a fixed price in writing before we start, and if we misjudge how long something takes, that is our lesson to pay for rather than yours.
We finish things properly
The painted edge nobody will inspect. The screw slot turned into line. The dust sheets, the clean floor, and the room left better than the brief required. These are habits, not favours, and they are the whole difference between a job done and a job finished.
We know our limits
Gas belongs with Gas Safe engineers, notifiable electrical work with NICEIC or NAPIT registered electricians, unvented cylinders with someone G3 qualified, and big trees with a qualified tree surgeon. We say so plainly and bring in people we would let loose on our own homes. A tradesperson who knows their limits has none that matter.
More than one pair of hands
Everybody was taught the same way
Nobody arrives at your door who has not been shown how we do things: dust sheets down, radios off, the underside finished as carefully as the top, and the room left better than we found it. Standards travel through a family rather more reliably than through a rota.
A network for everything else
Beyond the family sits the trusted network built over years: an electrician, a Gas Safe engineer, a HETAS installer, a carpet fitter, a specialist flooring layer and a tree surgeon. Each one has passed the only test that matters, which is that we would let them loose on our own homes.
Small enough to care, and staying that way
We are not trying to become a firm with vans and uniforms and somebody in an office deciding your job is too small. Growth is fine, but not at the price of you dealing with a stranger who has never met the person who quoted.
Nor are we a limited company. This is a self-employed business, run the way most trades of this size are run: we handle our own tax and National Insurance, and we are not registered for VAT, so the price we quote is the price you pay. If that changes as we grow, we will say so here rather than let you find out from an invoice.
What would we choose if this were our own home?The Book of Care · Chapter Four Read the Book of Care →
Why Prana
Prana is an old Sanskrit word for breath: the life force within all things. We use it as a metaphor rather than a philosophy, and there is no incense involved.
Every home has a life within it. Neglect drains that life slowly, a door at a time, a winter at a time, until a house that should be easy to live in quietly asks something of you every day. Thoughtful care restores it just as gradually, and usually sooner than people expect.
So the business does not simply repair houses. It helps homes breathe again. If that sounds like a large claim from people who fix hinges, spend an evening in a house where everything works and see whether you disagree.
The longer version, and the standards we hold ourselves to, are written down in The Book of Care. It is free, and nobody has to buy anything to read it. Alongside it sit The year in a house, which is what a house asks for season by season, and The chapters of a home, which follows the moments that tend to bring people to us.
Close enough to care
Godmanchester is home, so Huntingdon is minutes over the old bridge and St Ives a short hop along the Ouse. Brampton, Buckden, St Neots, Papworth and the Cambridgeshire villages are all comfortably within reach. Being nearby is not a detail: it is what makes a quick second opinion, an early fix and a proper relationship practical rather than theoretical.
If you want the shorter version of what we believe: a property is what you buy and sell, and a home is what happens in between. We have set out how that plays through a household's life in the chapters of a home.
The best way to judge us is a small job
Start with something modest and see how it goes: how the price was explained, whether we arrived when we said, and what the room looked like afterwards. Most of our work grows from exactly that.