Property CareHome › Godmanchester
This one is home.
Property care and handyman services in Godmanchester, from the people who live here. Every other town on this website is somewhere we travel to. Godmanchester is where we put the bins out. The houses here belong to our neighbours, and one or two of them are ours, which changes how carefully you work on somebody's front elevation.
A town that has been quietly getting on with it since the Romans
People arriving for the first time usually think Godmanchester is a nice bit of Huntingdon. Say that in The Exhibition and see how it goes. This was a Roman town called Durovigutum sitting on Ermine Street, it had its charter from King John in 1212, and it has been perfectly capable of running its own affairs for a very long time, thank you.
What you actually notice living here is smaller than any of that. The Chinese Bridge, which is a slightly improbable piece of Chippendale fancy over the mill stream and which everybody photographs. Portholme beyond it, the largest meadow in England, which floods in the winter and turns into something enormous and silver and worth putting your boots on for. The Causeway, the timber frames leaning companionably into one another, the swans that have opinions.
And then, in the last few years, Roman’s Edge and the roads off Gumcester Way, which have come close to doubling the size of the place. Say what you like about the pace of it, but Gumcester is how this town appears on the old maps, so somebody at least opened a history book before naming the roads. Most developers reach for a list of trees.
Two conservation areas, several hundred years of building and a brand new town on the edge of it, which means the house you own here could be almost anything. That is the part that matters to us, and it is the reason we are careful about what we say yes to.
The old town
Timber frame, lime plaster, wattle and daub, oak that has moved for four hundred years and intends to carry on. Modern filler, gypsum and impermeable paint do real harm here, slowly and invisibly. Repair beats replacement almost every time, and consent is sometimes needed, which we will tell you about before rather than after.
Near the river
Lovely, and damp-prone, and worth being realistic about. Ventilation, drainage and breathable materials do more than any sealant. If you are in a flood zone we will talk plainly about what is worth doing at low level and what is simply asking to be replaced again in five years.
The newer estates
The post-war streets, and then everything off Gumcester Way. Roman’s Edge has come close to doubling the size of the town, which means a great many houses all reaching the same age at the same time. Comfortable, well planned, and carrying a snagging list the developer has long since stopped answering the phone about: sealant that gave up in the first winter, doors nobody ever adjusted, a garden still consisting entirely of turf, and storage precisely nowhere. All of it ordinary, all of it a morning or two.
One service, at whatever size the house needs
It is really one service, offered at whatever size the house needs. A single sticking door is the small version. A room taken from tired to finished is the usual one, and we call that the Room Refresh. A whole property between tenants is the large one. Most of what we are asked to do in Godmanchester is one of those three, arrived at for one of six familiar reasons.
Underneath all of it the work is the same: preparation, the trades in the right order, and the finishing nobody else wants to do. These are the parts of it people usually ask about, and our indicative prices cover almost all of them.
You will see us in the Co-op
There is a particular kind of accountability that comes from working where you live. If we make a mess of your hallway, we will run into you by the river on Sunday. If we do it properly, you will mention us to somebody at the school gates. Neither of those things is true for a firm that drives in from forty miles away and never comes back.
It is also simply more practical. No call-out fees, because there is nothing to call out from. A second opinion on the way past. A small job done this week rather than bundled into next month to make the journey worthwhile. And if something goes wrong after we have finished, we are ten minutes from your door rather than a voicemail.
We are not going to pretend that being local makes us better at joinery. It does not. It makes us easier to get hold of, harder to disappear on, and considerably more careful, which turns out to matter just as much.
Neighbours, essentially.
Send us your list with a photo or two. If it is small and straightforward we can usually price it from that. For anything bigger we come and look first, walk round it with you, and then put a fixed price in writing.