Builder in Manchester

Manchester did not grow evenly. It went up in waves, and each wave left a different sort of house behind: two up two down terraces thrown up for mill workers, Victorian and Edwardian villas along the old carriage roads out of town, interwar semis on the estates that filled the gaps between them, sixties and seventies infill where bomb damage or slum clearance had taken a street out, and apartment conversions in buildings that were never homes at all.

That matters more than it sounds. The same extension drawn on paper costs different money on each of them, because what is holding the back wall up is different, what the foundation is sitting on is different, and how much of it you have to open before you know is different. A builder who quotes a Manchester job without asking which of those you have is guessing, and you will find out which way he guessed at the end.

In a city the constraint is rarely the work. It is getting to it. A terrace with a shared back entry, no side gate and a car parked in front of it changes how muck comes out and how materials go in, and that is labour, not materials. A semi with a driveway and a side path is a different day entirely.

It is worth settling at the quote rather than the start. Where a skip can sit, whether a permit is needed for it, whether a grab lorry can get down the street, and whether the neighbours' wall is coming into the conversation. None of that is exciting and all of it is the difference between a tidy job and a fortnight of arguing.

Manchester has a long list of conservation areas, and several of the suburbs people most want to extend in are inside one. In those streets what a window is made of, what the render is, what colour the brick is and whether a front elevation can change at all are not matters of taste. They are conditions.

Whether your particular job needs permission is the council's answer and nobody else's. What we will tell you at the quote is which parts of what you want are likely to need an application and which are not, so you can go and ask the right question before anybody orders anything.

Three things, most weeks. Rear extensions on terraces and semis, because the kitchen is the room everyone wants bigger. Loft conversions, because a fourth bedroom is cheaper than moving. And full refurbishments of a house somebody has just bought, where the whole thing comes back to brick in one go rather than a room at a time over five years.

The fourth, quietly, is putting right work somebody else did. That is a real part of a builder's week in a city this size and it is worth saying out loud rather than pretending every job starts from a clean wall.