Few suburbs in the inner west are as consistent as Ashbury. Most of it went up between the wars as Californian bungalows and Federation cottages, and that means the window openings we are fitting to, and repairing shutters on, share the same proportions and the same quirks street after street. Once you have worked on a dozen of these houses you know what you are walking into.
We cover the whole of Ashbury in the 2193 postcode, which is a small area bounded by Ashfield, Croydon Park, Canterbury and Hurlstone Park. Summer Hill and Croydon are on the same run, so a booking here rarely means a long wait for a technician to be in the area.
Interwar bungalows were not designed with roller shutters in mind. Nearly everything here is a retrofit onto brickwork and joinery that is close to a century old.
The look of these houses matters to the people who own them, and a shutter that has been slapped on without thought is obvious from the footpath. Where we can, we repair and refit the existing hardware rather than replacing it, and when a replacement is the only sensible option we will talk through how it will sit against the brickwork before anything is ordered. It is a short conversation that saves a lot of regret.
