Very little in Lewisham was built square. The Victorian and Federation housing through the 2049 postcode has been settling for a century or more, and an opening that measures true at the head will often be out by several millimetres at the sill. That one fact sits behind a large share of the shutter faults we are called to here.
We work across the whole of Lewisham, from the Parramatta Road end at the top of the suburb down through the residential streets to the Dulwich Hill boundary. Petersham and Summer Hill sit either side of us on the same run, so a job here rarely means a special trip.
The housing is mostly late Victorian and Federation, with terraces, semis and small freestanding cottages, and a good number have had a rear addition at some point. Shutters are almost without exception retrofitted rather than original to the building.
Before anything is ordered for a house of this age, the opening needs measuring at the head, the middle and the sill. On a Lewisham terrace those three numbers are rarely the same. A shutter fitted to the smallest of them can be packed and adjusted to sit true; one fitted to a drawing will fight the reveal for the rest of its life. Most of the premature failures we see here started as a measuring shortcut.
