Building your dreams and fixing your nightmares
British, twenty-five years in Berlin, and a qualified electrician with fifteen years of shopfitting and renovation behind me.
Who you're actually dealing with
Most people ring me after a bad experience. A quote that doubled. Someone who stopped answering the phone in week three. A kitchen fitted so badly the doors never lined up. It's rarely that the bloke couldn't do the work. It's that nobody was holding the job together, and nobody would give a straight answer in a language they spoke.
I'm British, I've been in Berlin twenty-five years, and I'm a qualified electrician with fifteen years of shopfitting and renovation behind me. You get the job explained in plain English, and dealt with in German where it has to be — the Hausverwaltung, the neighbours, the supplier who's lost your order. Shopfitting is where I learned to hit a fixed date and clean up behind myself, because a shop has to open on the day it says it will.
One person answering for it
I do the survey, the ordering, the sequencing and the work itself. On a bathroom that means the tiling doesn't start until the substrate is right, and the electrics go in before anyone closes a wall up. Obvious, but it's the thing that goes wrong most.
The tiling I hand to a mate who does nothing else. There's a real difference between someone who tiles now and then and someone who tiles every day, and on big porcelain in a room where nothing is square you can see it from the doorway for the next twenty years.
Where I stop
On plumbing I do half of it. I'll fit a shower, a toilet, a basin or new taps onto pipework and drainage that's already where it needs to be — that's a normal part of a bathroom for me. What I don't do is moving supply pipes or drainage to a new position. Once the soil pipe or the supply has to move, that's a plumber, and I'll bring one in and work around them.
I don't do architecture or structural engineering at all. Separate disciplines, separate liability, and anyone who tells you different is cutting a corner. Same approach: I get them in at the right point and keep everything running to one schedule, so you're not the one chasing three trades over WhatsApp.
Knowing where the line is isn't a limitation. It's why the rest of it lands on time.
Berlin flats are their own problem
Twenty-five years here means very little surprises me. Walls out by centimetres rather than millimetres. Floors with sand and rubble fill between the joists. Lime plaster that won't hold a modern fixing. Circuits with no earth. Three-and-a-half metre ceilings with Stuck somebody has already half wrecked. None of it is a disaster, but it changes the price and the timeline, and you're better off hearing it before we start than in week two.