Carpentry

Most jobs around a house come back to carpentry at some point. There's the bones of it — bearers, joists, wall and roof framing — and then the finish work you actually see, the architraves and skirting and stairs, the bits that have to line up dead square. We do both ends of that. The rough structural stuff under the floor, and the trim that gets painted and noticed.

I'm Dave. All Round Carpentry is a local, owner-run outfit working right across the Illawarra — Helensburgh down through the Gong and out to Nowra and the Shoalhaven. You deal with me, not a call centre or a different bloke every visit. Fully licensed and insured, and we turn up when we say we will.

Structural carpentry done properly

This is the work that holds everything else up, so it pays to get it right the first time. Bearers and joists, subfloor repairs, wall framing, lintels, roof framing — all of it sized and fixed to suit the load and the span.

A fair bit of our structural work is repair, and the Illawarra throws up its own version of that. Older fibro and weatherboard places near the coast cop years of salt air and the odd southerly buster, and you find soft joists, rotted bearer ends and termite damage once you pull a floor up. We've seen plenty of it. We cut out what's gone, splice or replace in treated pine or hardwood depending on where it sits, and tie it back into sound timber so the floor stops bouncing and the wall stops moving.

Sloping blocks are their own thing. A lot of the back half of these suburbs runs uphill into the escarpment, and that changes how a subfloor or a deck frame has to be set out. We work with the fall, not against it.

Renovations, extensions and the finish work

Pulling a wall out, adding a room out the back, opening a kitchen up to the living area — that's bread-and-butter for us. We'll handle the framing, posts and beams, then come back through with the finish carpentry once the other trades are done: hanging doors, fitting architraves and skirting, building or repairing stairs and handrails, and making the new bits sit flush with the old.

Matching is the part people underrate. Half the post-war homes down here have a skirting or architrave profile you won't find on a shelf, so we either match what's there or get a length run to suit. Done right, you can't pick where the old work stops and the new starts.

A few things we get asked for a lot:

• Removing or altering internal walls (we sort whether it's load-bearing first)
• New skirting, architraves and trim through a whole house or a single room
• Building, repairing or replacing internal and external stairs
• Patching up sagging floors, dodgy framing and the previous owner's rough work

On the approval side, I won't dress this up. Like-for-like repairs and most cosmetic trim work don't need a council nod, but structural changes and extensions generally do — whether that's through Wollongong, Shellharbour, Kiama or Shoalhaven council, or a private certifier. I'll tell you early what your job actually needs so there's no nasty surprise halfway through. And I build to what's been signed off.

Straight answers, tidy work

You'll get a real quote after I've had a look, not a number plucked out of the air. A small repair might be a few hundred dollars and a morning's work. A room's worth of trim is more like a day or two. Structural and extension carpentry runs longer, and I'll give you a timeframe up front. Either way you'll know roughly what you're up for before I start, and I keep the site tidy as I go rather than leaving you a mess to deal with.

Got a reno coming up, a floor that's seen better days, or a wall you've been eyeing off? Give me a call on 0414 007 351 for a chat or a free quote. Happy to come out and have a look — no pressure either way.