About
Reece Dalton
Retrofit and deep renovation specialist, working across the north west of England. Five years in the trade.
The work
Most of it is retrofit: making an older house warm without wrecking the way it handles water. Where a wall has no cavity to fill, and where insulating the outside would change the front of the house, the work goes on the inside — wood fibre board bedded onto the masonry, a sealed layer taped across the whole envelope, and ventilation put in to deal with the air that can no longer find its own way out.
None of those three works on its own. Insulation with air moving through it does very little; a sealed house with no ventilation gets damp; and ventilation in a house that leaks everywhere is throwing away the heat it was fitted to save. They are specified and built as one thing.
Alongside it comes everything that taking a house apart involves — kitchens, studwork, ceilings, joinery, lofts, roofs, and the panel systems that go on them.
Why the photographs
Nearly every photograph on this site was taken mid-job rather than at the end. That is deliberate. Insulation and airtightness are judged entirely on detailing that disappears behind plasterboard — once a room is finished and decorated, a good job and a poor one look identical, and the difference only shows up three winters later.
52 photographs across 19 jobs, in the order the work happened. If you are specifying work, the junctions are the part worth looking at.