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When to DIY, and when to call a handyman: a straight guide

Not every job needs a handyman. Not every job is safe to DIY. A working-tradesman guide to when the call is worth making for a Folkestone-area homeowner.

Most of the small jobs I get called out for around Folkestone are jobs the customer could have done. Sometimes that means it was not worth my callout - and I will say so. Sometimes the DIY route is the wrong route because of a hidden risk. Here is the working list, applied to the coastal and clifftop housing stock in this patch.

Do it yourself

• Filling nail holes and small plaster cracks. Multi-purpose filler, sand back, touch-in with matched paint. £15 of materials, one Saturday morning.
• Bleeding radiators. Standard bleed key, quarter turn, listen for water. If you get more air than water, you have a system-pressure issue - stop and get a boiler engineer.
• Draught-strip on doors and sash windows. Adhesive-backed EPDM foam strip. Trims to length with scissors. Half an hour per door.
• Silicone re-seal around a bath. Cut out the old, clean, apply new sanitary-grade silicone with a smoother-tool. Watch a five-minute video first.
• Squeaky stair tread from underneath (where cellar or under-stair access exists). Screw down from below into the string. Silent immediately, common on the older terraced streets.

Call the handyman

• Sticking door that used to open fine. Almost always frame movement, not the door - common on the steeper Old High Street terraces. Requires planing and re-hanging, not just a plane on the door edge.
• Gutter clear on anything over 3m off ground. Ladder work at height without a foot-stand or roof-anchor is where accidents happen, worse on steep or clifftop terrain. Not worth £180 for a broken wrist.
• Rotten timber fascia or soffit. If you have to cut old timber out and splice new in, that is a shopping-list, joinery-and-paint job. Half-day, £180 including materials on a standard bay.
• Toilet fill valve that keeps running. Cheap parts, awkward tank access, tank refit under the seat is easy to get wrong. £120 fixed to swap the valve, done same visit.
• Fence panel down after a Channel gale. Panels sit in slotted concrete posts. Getting one back in on your own with a wet fence is a two-person job with a lift risk.

Call a specialist, not a handyman

• Any notifiable electrical work (new circuit, kitchen re-wire, consumer unit change). qualified electrician.
• Any gas-side work on the boiler, cooker, or gas fire. Gas Safe registered engineer.
• Any structural change (removing a wall, altering a lintel bearing). Structural engineer sign-off then a builder.
• Anything on a listed elevation that changes what you can see from the street. Folkestone & Hythe District Council conservation team, then Listed Building Consent, then a heritage-specialist joiner.
• Any suspected land movement or subsidence near The Warren or the clifftop - a structural engineer with coastal-slope experience, not a general builder.

The point of a handyman is the small jobs that do not fit the specialists' book but do need a tradesman. If your job is on the DIY list, save the callout. If it is on the specialist list, do not economise - get the right person.