Renovations in Dalston

Dalston's terraces went up quickly for a growing city and they have been altered ever since. Behind the bay fronts on the streets between Ridley Road Market and London Fields you find solid nine inch brickwork, suspended timber ground floors, lath and plaster ceilings and a two storey closet wing with a narrow side return beside it. Add a century of rewiring, a mid century subdivision into flats and a kitchen fitted in the nineties, and you have the typical E8 renovation. GS Renovation takes those layers off in order, sorts the fabric first, and only then builds the rooms actually asked for. Every job is fully insured and carries a five year guarantee on installations we carry out.

The Fabric Underneath a Dalston Terrace

Solid walls with no cavity behave differently from anything modern, and a great deal of what looks like rising damp in E8 turns out to be something simpler. Garden levels raised over the years until soil sits above the damp proof course. Airbricks painted over or buried, so the void under the timber ground floor stops breathing and joist ends soften where they sit in the wall. Cement render trapping moisture that lime once let out. We open up, look at the actual cause and deal with it, because putting new plaster and new flooring over an unresolved source of water is money spent twice within three winters.

Services are the other half of the story. It is common to find a mixture of rewires from different decades sharing a consumer unit, lead supply pipe still in the front garden, heating pipework chased into walls with no insulation on it, and a bathroom extension plumbed into a stack that was never sized for it. Renovating a whole house gives you one chance to do this properly while floors are up and plaster is off. We sequence first fix before plastering, get inspections done at the right stages, and coordinate building control applications so the certification exists when a future buyer's solicitor asks for it.

Opening Up the Ground Floor and Getting Materials In

Dividing the two reception rooms in a Dalston terrace is a wall that is normally doing real work, carrying floor joists above and sometimes a chimney stack. Taking it out to make one long room needs a beam that has been designed for the span and the load, with bearings formed to suit. A structural engineer produces that design and we build to it, propping properly while the wall comes down and checking for movement before the props come away. In a mid terrace the bearings often land in walls shared with neighbours on both sides, which brings duties under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 that are far easier served early than argued about late.

Getting a job in and out of an E8 terrace is its own problem. There is rarely any rear access, so every joist, every bag of sand and every barrow of rubble travels through the front door and down a hallway with your floor under it. We board and sheet the route before anything heavy moves. Parking sits within controlled zones, so permits are arranged before the start date rather than on the morning, and skip placement is applied for or replaced with bagged waste on scheduled collections. Around Ridley Road we time deliveries away from the busiest market hours so the street stays workable for everyone.

Where most Dalston projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Dalston, everything we cover across Hackney, renovations in Shoreditch, renovations in Stoke Newington and how to plan a renovation.