2025: the year in review
Twenty-eight jobs completed, three apprenticeship hours given, and one lesson per quarter that's worth writing down.
Twenty-eight jobs completed across 2025. Twelve were built-in joinery, eight structural (decks and pergolas), four restorations, four furniture. One lesson per quarter worth writing down.
Q1: don't undercharge for restoration. Heritage work is genuinely twice as slow as new build because every cut is bespoke. We were quoting it at 1.5x and burning the margin.
Q2: invest in measurement gear. Bought a laser distance meter that talks to a digital level. Trimmed about 40 minutes off every site survey and the numbers are more reliable than the tape-and-square workflow we used to do.
Q3: subcontractor diligence matters. Had one near-miss with a plumber on a kitchen job who routed a waste line through where our pull-out drawer was supposed to live. Now every job has a 15-minute coordination call with every other trade before anyone cuts.
Q4: photograph everything. We started keeping a structured photo journal of every job (before/during/after, plus close-ups of any unusual detail). It's already paid off twice with warranty claims that turned out to be third-party damage, and once with a heritage matching job where we needed to reference our own work from two years ago.
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