Carpenters near you

Describing the job in the trade's own stages helps you get comparable quotations. A carpenter who mainly frames roofs and floors is not necessarily the person to scribe a run of shelving into an out-of-square Victorian alcove, and the joiner who makes a staircase in a workshop may not be the one who fits it.

For single-trade work a carpenter is the direct route: new internal doors throughout, a fitted wardrobe, skirting and architrave after a replastering job, a staircase refurbishment or a stud partition with nothing running through it. You deal with the person doing the work and small decisions get made on the spot.

As soon as a job crosses trades or touches the structure, a builder or main contractor is usually the better appointment. Taking down a wall between a kitchen and dining room brings in a structural engineer for the beam, an electrician for anything disturbed, a plasterer to make good, and building control. The Planning Portal notes that you should not need to apply for planning permission for internal alterations including building or removing an internal wall, but that is planning permission only: the building regulations still apply, and Schedule 1 to the Building Regulations 2010 requires that a building be constructed so that combined dead, imposed and wind loads are sustained and transmitted to the ground safely. Whoever you engage, make sure one party is plainly responsible for the whole job.

Most second fix carpentry needs no approval at all. Structural work does, and so does anything that alters stairs, guarding or the electrical installation. In England and Wales you either apply to a building control body, which can be your local authority or a private registered building control approver, or you use a tradesperson registered with a competent person scheme, who notifies on your behalf and gives you a certificate within eight weeks of completion. Government is explicit about why this matters when you come to sell: without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need.

Two parts of the building regulations come up repeatedly in carpentry. Requirement K2 says that stairs, ramps, floors and balconies and any roof to which people have access shall be provided with barriers where it is necessary to protect people in or about the building from falling, which is why a new stair or a landing balustrade is not a matter of taste. Requirement Q1, on resisting unauthorised access, applies only in relation to new dwellings, so a carpenter hanging a replacement front door in an existing house is not working to Part Q, whatever a sales brochure implies.

Listing changes everything. The Planning Portal states that if you live in a listed building you will need listed building consent for any significant works whether internal or external, and that includes interior joinery that an owner might assume is nobody else's business. Scotland runs a separate system: the Scottish building standards regulations are administered by local authorities, which grant permission for work to be done through a building warrant and for a completed building to be occupied through a completion certificate. Northern Ireland works to the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012, whose parts are lettered differently again, with stairs, ramps, guarding and protection from impact under Part H. Ask which system your property sits in before assuming an English rule applies.

A good carpentry job is decided before any timber is cut. The carpenter should measure on site rather than from your sketch, check whether walls and floors are square and level, agree where materials will be cut and stored, and say in writing what is included: making good, filling and sanding, decoration, ironmongery, and removal of waste and old timber. Older British housing is rarely square, and the allowance for scribing and packing is the difference between a fitted look and visible gaps.

Site safety has a legal shape even on domestic work. Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 a domestic client is anyone who has construction work carried out on their home, or the home of a family member, that is not done as part of any business, and the client duties pass to others: on a single-contractor project the contractor takes them on, and where there is more than one contractor they fall to the principal contractor, unless a principal designer has been appointed in writing to manage the project instead. In practice that means you are not expected to run the site, but you should know which business is carrying the duty.

LokalMatch is where the search for that business starts. You describe the carpentry job once, including the property, the rooms involved, your postcode and when you would like the work done, and matched carpenters and joiners get in touch with you directly; the professionals pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not carry out the work, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone, so the insurance check, the written specification and the visit to see previous work stay with you.

Two health risks sit squarely in this trade's path, and both are worth understanding before someone starts cutting into your house. HSE states that asbestos may be part of any commercial or domestic building which was built or refurbished before the year 2000, and that if a tradesperson unexpectedly disturbs something that might contain it they should stop work immediately, confirm what it is or assume it is asbestos, and carry out a risk assessment. Lifting floors, opening ceilings, removing old boarding around boilers and cutting into partitions in a pre-2000 house are exactly the moments that happens.

Dust is the slower risk. HSE warns that regularly breathing construction dust can cause diseases such as lung cancer, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and silicosis, and expects the assess, control and review approach of the COSHH regulations, with controls such as on-tool extraction and respiratory protective equipment rather than an open window. A carpenter cutting sheet materials or sanding in an occupied house should be using extraction and sheeting rooms off, which is also why the tidiest quote is not always the cheapest.

Some work is simply not a carpenter's to do. Gas work in a home must go to a Gas Safe registered engineer, and electrical work in dwellings is governed by Part P of the building regulations, so disconnecting a hob to fit a unit, or moving a socket behind new shelving, belongs to those trades even when the carpenter is standing right there.