Service 01
Bespoke Joinery and Fitted Furniture
Custom cabinetry shaped to your room and your life, not borrowed from a showroom floor.
Hand-built bookcases, alcove cupboards, media walls, window seats, home offices and dining room joinery.
Every bespoke project at TGH CARPENTRY LTD begins with a conversation about how your room is used and how you want it to feel. We then measure the space with care, noting the small truths a drawing board will never show: the slope of an old floor, the bow in a wall, the way the light falls across the alcove at five o clock.
Our fitted furniture is built as individual pieces in the Gatewick Lane workshop before it is ever carried through your door. This matters for two reasons. First, we can control the environment: the glue cures slowly, the joints pull tight, and the finish is applied in thin, even coats without dust settling. Second, we can build to a standard of joinery that site work alone rarely allows. Dovetails and proper housing joints keep the carcass true long after a truck full of cam locks would have begun to creak.
We work most often in solid oak, walnut, ash and tulipwood, and we are equally happy to build in high-quality plywood carcases faced with real timber, which gives you the stability of engineered board with the warmth of genuine wood. Fitted wardrobes with tailored internal storage, home office desks that hide the cables, kitchen islands that double as breakfast bars, and wall units that hold a library rather than a televisions silence are all within reach of this service.
Service 02
Kitchen and Wardrobe Fitting
Precision installation of ready-made systems combined, where you ask, with made-to-measure fronts and interiors.
TGH CARPENTRY LTD installs flat-pack and premium kitchen systems alike, but we never treat your cabinets as furniture to be stood on a floor and hoped for. Every unit is packed level and plumb, secured through the back panels to a strapping ground that we fix to the masonry, and checked with a spirit level tall and wide before the next unit goes in.
Doors are hung so they close of their own weight, drawer slides are tuned until each drawer rolls home without a rattle, and worktop joints are cut to a tolerance you can only perceive by running a fingernail across them. If you order from a flat-pack supplier, we assemble every box on carpet pads, keep the parts organised, and remove all the packaging from your house at the end. If you prefer a made-to-measure scheme, we design and build the carcases ourselves on site so the fit is exact from the first day.
Wardrobe fitting follows the same rule book. Whether you bring us a rail-and-shelf system or ask us to craft a fully fitted dressing room, we shape the space above, below and beside the standard sizes to capture every usable millimetre. Shoe racks, pull-out drawer stacks, hidden charging points and full-height doors are measures we are glad to include. We seal wardrobes to the wall lines with planted scribes, so the unit looks carved into the room rather than parked in front of it.
Service 03
Staircases and Balustrades
New joinery designed, made and fitted for lofts, renovations and period restorations.
A staircase is the single biggest piece of joinery most households ever commission, and it earns patient treatment. TGH CARPENTRY LTD designs and builds open and closed tread staircases, straight flights, quarter and half landings, and compact lofts runs with storage built into every tread.
We cut stringers to a steel square laid out on the workshop floor, house the treads and risers into them with wedges and glue, and site the whole unit on pads that leave the surrounding structure undisturbed. Where a period home loses a staircase to rot or a previous botched alteration, we match the original pitch, the run of the treads and the profile of the old handrail so the new stair reads as though it has always stood there.
Our balustrades are fitted to the stair and landing with equal discipline. Spindles are cut to a tenon and housed into the rail and the stringer, never merely screwed on the slant and hoped level. Handrails are shaped to sit naturally in the hand, with a returned easing at every turning so a walking hand never meets a sharp corner. We fit both glass and timber infill panels, and we will happily match an existing sweep of iron spindles if that is the character you want to keep.
Service 04
Timber Frame and Structural Work
Stud walls, joists, roof timbers and garden structures built strong and parted out square.
Not every timber job lives inside a piece of furniture. TGH CARPENTRY LTD also takes on the structural side of carpentry: internal stud walls, floor joists, roof timbers, garden rooms, pergolas and full timber framing for extensions and new builds.
We lay out each frame from a rod drawn to full size, cut every member to length with a clean face, and assemble on deck so that wall panels arrive true. Load-bearing timbers are matched to the engineers schedule and set on proper plates and packs, with noggins staggered so the frame can shrug off movement without creaking. Where a frame will show, we treat it both as structure and as finish: the members are selected for straight, even grain and dressed smooth before they go up.
For garden rooms and oak frames, we cut the primary timbers oversized, allow them to season with the seasons in our stickered stack, and assemble with traditional oak pegs driven through the joints so the structure can breathe. We co-ordinate with the builder, the architect and, where needed, the structural engineer, and we keep a full photographic record of what we load into the ground so that nothing about your build is guesswork later.
Service 05
Floor and Deck Installation
Quiet, level floors inside and generous, ventilated decks out in the garden.
Nothing ages a room faster than a floor that dips toward a corner or a board that rides proud of its neighbour. TGH CARPENTRY LTD lays solid oak, engineered timber and laminate floors over a levelled and dried subfloor, using expansion gaps that account for the moisture of the room so the surface neither tents nor gapes.
We lay boards in a pattern agreed with you before the first one is dropped, run the rows square off the longest wall or off a line struck from the door, and nail, glue or float each methodically according to the manufacturer spec and the site. Floorboards are individually glued on their secret tongues at staggered ends, and every cut around a door casing or hearth is made to a template so the beads stand clean.
Outside, our timber decks are built on heavy pressure-treated bearers raised off the ground on a ventilated cradle of pads and battens, so no piece of structure sits in standing water to rot it from below. Joists are laid level and parallel, boards are gapped with a nail for free drainage, and corners are mitred rather than butted so the face grain reads unbroken. We can build wrapping platforms around a pool, sun-drenched dining decks off a kitchen door, and low, wide steps that make a garden easy to use for every generation of the household.
Service 06
Restoration and Repairs
A second life for aged doors, windows, floors and furniture that many hands gave up on.
Some of the most satisfying work to leave the Gatewick Lane bench is restoration, because it asks for judgement as much as skill. TGH CARPENTRY LTD repairs sash windows whose cords have snapped and whose boxes have sagged, draughty external doors that no longer latch, floors gnawed by damp, and pieces of family furniture with joints that have loosened after forty years of honest service.
We are careful restorers rather than aggressive ones. A loose joint is opened, cleaned of old adhesive, and re-set with fresh glue and a clamp in the original position; we do not rip a table apart because it is quicker. Rotten ends are cut back to sound timber and spliced with the same species, grain matched as far as the piece will allow, and original ironmongery is kept wherever its screws still bite. Where a hinge or a lock is beyond life, we source a period replacement rather than an off-the-shelf modern plate that would betray the line of the door.
We also restore timber surfaces. Deep clean, subtle strip where twenty coats have left a treacle skin, and re-finish in oils, hard wax or a matched varnish so the grain reads true without the plastic shine that shouts of a spray booth. If a piece matters to your family, tell me its history and we will treat it with the respect it has earned.