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The best storage disappears.
Fitted storage, alcove joinery and loft boarding across Huntingdonshire. Every home deserves room to breathe. Almost nobody needs a bigger house. What most people need is for the house they have to hold their belongings sensibly, so that the hall is not a cloakroom, the spare room is not a warehouse, and the loft is something other than a place things go to be forgotten.
Made for your walls, not a catalogue
- Alcove shelving and cupboards either side of the chimney breast, scribed to the wall
- Full-height bookcases built into the room rather than standing in front of it
- Under-stairs storage: drawers, a cupboard, a desk nook or a place for shoes and coats that works
- Loft boarding done properly, raised above the insulation so it keeps working
- Loft ladders and hatches, including enlarging a hatch that is too small to be useful
- Loft lighting, so nobody balances a torch again
- Garage racking, shelving and bike storage that clears the floor
- Utility and boot room shelving, hooks and benches for the muddy end of family life
- Wardrobe interiors reorganised: better rails, shelves and drawers inside what you already have
- Window seats with storage beneath, which is the most useful piece of joinery in most houses
- Home office shelving that hides the cables and the router
- Airing cupboard slatted shelving replaced or added
Storage is a design problem, not a shopping problem
Storage that works naturally
Before anything is drawn, we ask what actually needs storing and how often you reach for it. Daily things belong between waist and shoulder; annual things belong in the loft. Most storage fails because that question was never asked.
Built in, not stood against
Fitted joinery scribed to your walls uses every inch, sits flush and reads as part of the house. Flat-pack in an alcove wastes the corners and always announces itself.
Insulation stays insulation
Boarding straight onto joists squashes loft insulation flat and quietly costs you money every winter. We raise the boarding above it on legs, which is more work, more materials, and the only correct way to do it.
Storage, not a room
Boarding a loft for suitcases and Christmas boxes is straightforward work. Turning a loft into a habitable room is an entirely different matter, involving structural calculations, escape routes, fire separation, proper stairs and Building Regulations approval, and it belongs with a builder and an architect rather than with us.
A word about weight. Loft joists in most houses were sized to hold up a ceiling, not a library, and we will say so if what you are planning to store up there is heavier than the structure would like.
Alcove shelving is around £485 a bay, made to fit and painted. Loft boarding raised above the insulation runs roughly £30 to £45 a square metre depending on access, with a ladder and hatch upgrade from £380. Under-stairs storage and window seats are quoted to the design, and generally start around £900.
These are starting points, not a menu. Combine them, split them, or ask for the one job you actually want. If that is a single curtain pole, send us that one line and a single curtain pole is all we will price.
A good half of the loft boarding we are asked about is really a decluttering job. We will say so before you pay us to build somewhere to keep things you have already decided you do not want. If, after a weekend of honest sorting, you still need the space, it will still be here and so will we.
Storage that ends at the carcass is half a job. Fitted means painted, scribed to a wall that is never straight, and the floor made good where the old furniture stood. The room should look as though the storage was always there.
The Book of Care explains the rest of how we think, and costs nothing.
Which room has lost the argument?
The overflowing one, usually. Send a photograph of the space and tell us what needs to live there, and we will come back with an idea and a written price.