Our Office Is in Solihull, B37
Most companies that say they cover Birmingham are driving in from somewhere else. We are not. The registered office is in B37, a few minutes from junction 6 of the M42 and from Birmingham Airport, and it is an office we work out of rather than an address on a letterhead. That is the difference between a survey booked for next month and one booked for this week.
It also changes what happens during a job rather than before it. When something needs looking at halfway through a build, someone can be on site the same day instead of the following week. The same applies to the work we do for landlords and managing agents, where a void week costs real money, and to commercial sites on planned maintenance contracts where a missed visit is the whole problem.
Two Councils, Two Rulebooks
Birmingham City Council and Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council are separate planning authorities, which catches people out more than anything else in this area. Two near-identical 1930s semis a mile apart, one in Hall Green and one in Olton, can get different answers to the same application. Add the conservation areas on both sides, Moseley, Edgbaston, the Jewellery Quarter, Knowle, Olton and Dorridge among them, plus the Bournville Village Trust covenants that sit outside the planning system altogether, and the rules change street by street.
We check which authority and which designation applies to your address before anything is drawn. The application itself, the Building Control sign-off, the party wall notices where a neighbour is affected and the structural calculations are all handled by us, whether the job is a single storey extension, a loft conversion or a full home renovation.
A Housing Mix That Spans a Century
Very little links the housing here apart from the postcode. Moseley, Balsall Heath and Sparkhill are Victorian and Edwardian terraces with solid nine-inch walls and no cavity. Hall Green, Acocks Green, Kings Heath, Shirley and Olton are mile after mile of 1930s semis with a narrow cavity nobody ever filled. Chelmsley Wood is post-war system-built. Knowle, Dorridge and Sutton Coldfield run to large detached houses with big uninsulated roof voids, and Dickens Heath and Blythe Valley are new enough to need almost nothing to the fabric at all.
So the right first job is different in each of them. The 1930s semis get most from cavity fill and a proper loft insulation job. The solid wall terraces cannot be injected and need external wall insulation instead. The larger older houses usually lose their heat upward before the walls are worth discussing, and often want a heating system upgrade sized for the house rather than inherited from the last one. One genuinely local note: much of Birmingham’s mains water arrives down the Elan aqueduct from reservoirs in Powys and is soft, so limescale damages cylinders and heat exchangers far less here than in the South East. It does not remove the need for system protection, but it does change the risk.
Access, the Clean Air Zone and Getting Work Done
Birmingham’s Clean Air Zone covers the area inside the A4540 Middleway ring road, and a non-compliant vehicle entering it pays a daily charge. Most residential work across Solihull and the outer suburbs never touches it, but a job in Edgbaston or the Jewellery Quarter does, and that belongs in the quote rather than appearing later. Beyond the zone the constraints are ordinary ones: inner-city terraces with rear entries and no off-street parking, interwar semis sharing a drive with next door, and scaffold and skips that have to be planned before week one.
Generation and heating come last in that planning, not first. If the fabric is already sound, which it often is on the newer estates, solar PV with battery storage or an air source heat pump can go straight in and we will say so. If it is not, we will say that instead. A heat pump fitted to a cold house has to be bigger, costs more to buy, costs more to run and still struggles in February.
Plenty of work needs none of this. A kitchen renovation or a reworked living room is internal, so it comes down to sequencing the trades and protecting the rest of the house while it happens. The same team handles both sides of the business, which is the whole reason the building work and the energy work can be designed around each other instead of fighting.
- Based in Solihull B37, not covering the area from somewhere else
- Builders, electricians, heating engineers and insulation fitters all in-house
- Planning, Building Control and party wall notices handled by us
- MCS certified for solar PV and air source heat pumps
- Free survey at the property, never a price quoted down the phone
- Written workmanship warranty on every completed job
Solihull and Birmingham are where we are based, but they are one of six areas we work in, and the same team, the same certification and the same warranty apply wherever the job is. You can see the full list on our areas we cover page, or read how we work as builders and renewable energy installers across the UK. If you would rather spread the cost of a larger job, the terms are set out on our finance page.
