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There’s a conversation we have regularly with homeowners across Weymouth, Dorchester, and the surrounding villages. It usually starts with: “We need more space.” And it almost always ends somewhere more interesting than a white box extension.
We don’t do new build. We don’t do extensions. What we do — and what we’d argue is the most rewarding category of home improvements for any property owner — is look very hard at what you already have, and find the space that’s hiding in plain sight.
Because in our experience, the problem is rarely square footage. It’s almost always how that square footage is being used.
Builders who don’t turn up (or worse, keep going to other jobs while yours is only half done!), poor workmanship and zero communication — every street in Dorset has a story about a bad tradesperson.
We've all heard the horror stories, and if you've read our post on “struggling to find reliable tradespeople”, you'll know it's the single most common frustration we hear from homeowners across Weymouth, Portland and Dorchester. But here's the thing the horror stories rarely mention: in almost every case, there was no proper written agreement. No fixed price. No scope of work. Nothing to fall back on when it all went sideways.
So this post tackles both halves of the problem. First — how do you actually find a good tradesperson? And second — the half nobody talks about — what should be in writing before anyone lifts a tool?
If you're a landlord, you'll know the temptation. A property needs freshening up between tenancies, you're watching the budget, and a tin of basic matt emulsion seems like the obvious choice. It's cheap, it covers well enough, and it gets the job done.
Except it doesn't — not really.
Outhouse Creative Upcycling is Russell's workshop and shop in Southill, Weymouth — a one-man operation built on the idea that the wood, glass, metal and mechanical bits everyone else skips still have a job left in them. The name isn't just a play on words: the building itself used to be a public toilet block, upcycled into a shop.
Russell's own sign on the wall puts it better than we could — "our world is so wasteful in things we throw away unnecessarily," he writes, and the Outhouse is his answer to it.