Building Services in Balham

Most of the building work we take on in Balham comes down to its Victorian terraces — the two-storey rows around Hildreth Street, Bedford Hill and the Heaver Estate, a great many of them long since split into upper and lower flats. On solid-wall houses like these the mortar joints erode over the decades, brickwork spalls and settling cracks open up in the plaster, and we handle the lot: raking out and repointing weathered brickwork, cutting out blown plaster and making good, and repairing the bay fronts where movement has opened up the corners. On the more decorative late-Victorian streets of the Heaver Estate and the Nightingale Triangle, the moulded brick, render bands and stucco to the bay fronts need a careful eye when they are repaired, so the detail is kept rather than lost.

Towards Wandsworth Common the Edwardian terraces and the mansion flats near the Common carry heavier, more solid structure, and the work there tends toward re-rendering rear additions, repairing parapets and chimney stacks, and tracing damp in the lower flats before anything is redecorated. The conversions across SW12 bring their own building jobs — patched-over alterations from earlier splits, shared party walls, and lower-ground rooms that hold damp — and we look for the cause first rather than skimming over the surface.

We work for owner-occupiers, landlords and letting agents right across SW12, from single repairs — a length of repointing, a cracked lintel, a patch of failed render — through to fuller refurbishments where several trades run together under one team. Larger and structural jobs, from a rear alteration to a movement crack that keeps opening, we scope and price properly after a site visit rather than guessing over the phone, so you get an honest figure and a realistic timescale before we start. Where a run of smaller jobs can be batched into one visit — a bit of pointing, a lintel, a patch of plaster — we will do that for one clear price.