London Handyman

London Handyman

Our customers are generally home owners, office managers, small businesses, shops, restaurants, property managers and landlords.

What our customers say about our Handyman service

Residential Customers

Choose from our list of fixed price jobs or just pay for the time it takes for us to get through your list of jobs.

Our Handymen can undertake most plumbing, electrics as well as all your hanging, fitting, fixing, mending, assembling and minor decorating.

We'll offer you a fixed arrival time slot and you can pay the Handyman directly at the end of the visit using a Credit/Debit Card, Cheque or Cash.

Our Handymen travel around London on motorbikes, so traffic, parking and the congestion charge are not issues. We carry a full set of tools and a selection of screws and fixings with us on the bikes. If you require any specific parts we'll nip out to the nearest store to pick these up, this never takes very long, but is often necessary.

Because we are on motorbikes, we cannot carry stepladders. If you require any work to be done at height a stepladder or sturdy chair will need to be onsite for us to use. We don't mind standing on furniture if you don't.

Commercial Customers

All our Handymen are considerate and discreet. We'll carry out the work you need doing with as little disruption as possible to the work environment.
We'd prefer to be paid at the end of each visit. However we can invoice business customers if there are no payment facilities onsite.

We'll send you one Handyman that can: Change light bulbs, repair door handles, mend office furniture, hang whiteboards, repair faulty toilets, fix dripping taps and much much more.

Property Managers or Landlords

We offer a product specifically designed with Landlords and Property Managers in mind. For the cost of £35+VAT we'll arrange a visit to suit your tenants schedule, inspect the work that needs carrying out and issue an estimate for repair. This estimate will contain a ceiling price.

This means that we will guarantee that the cost of the work will not exceed the ceiling price. The cost could be less if the job goes quicker than expected.

Whether you choose to go ahead with the work or not, all you'll have to pay is £35+VAT for the survey and estimate.

The survey is booked as a half-hour slot and the Handyman will usually have to return on a separate day to actually undertake the work. However it may sometimes be possible to complete the work on the same visit.

The cost of the survey will need to be paid up front, but we will invoice you separately for the cost of the actual work should you choose to proceed.

Half-Term Handyman

Even though none of us in the office have kids, we can always tell when it is half term or the schools are on holiday. Bookings drop noticeably.

It must be a combination of allot of families going away for the half-term break and mothers not wanting to deal with a handyman when they have their hands full looking after their kids.

Hopefully we can expect a peak in bookings when everyone gets back from their break and realises they need a handyman to get all those odd jobs done around their homes.

London Handyman Service

Silver Saints is London's premier handyman service.

0207 0999 199
fixit@silversaints.co.uk

We are best described as a team of multi-skilled, experienced and reliable Handymen who travel around London on motorcycles undertaking plumbing, electrics, fixing, fitting, assembling and hanging jobs. In fact we employ the most experience handymen in London.
Friendly, Flexible, Efficient and Trustworthy - these are the words that describe our Silver Saints Handyman Service and these are the words you'll be using when telling your friends about how we showed up on time, did all the jobs on your ‘to do’ list, cleaned up after ourselves and charged you fairly and accurately.

(Read what our customers think about Silver Saints)

Silver Saints has the most experienced Handymen in London. In addition most come from professional backgrounds that include: Engineers, Accountants, Management Consultants, Quantity Surveyors and even a Royal Air Force Pilot. This means that you are getting a person who has great communication skills, copes well under pressure and understands the value of customer relations.We know what it takes to offer great customer service and we strive to leave a satisfied customer 100% of the time. Our dedicated Operations Team, based in Central London, are on call to discuss any jobs you need doing, as well as manage your booking until completion.

That is enough about us! Give us a call or book online and let us concentrate on giving you the Silver Service you deserve. 0207 0999 199

Special Delivery

Silver Saints is London's premier handyman service. One of the things that makes us different from the other London handyman services is the fact that we will go out of our way to solve our customer's problems.

Over the last few weeks this has lead to us having to source, deliver and fit a few out of the ordinary items. These included:

Porcelain Tiles:
We spent 3 days searching for 1 box of a particualr polished porcelain tile in order to repair a leaking shower without having to re-tile the whole bathroom. After 15 different tile shops and about 100 miles of traveling we managed to source the matching tiles from a specialist tile shop in Kingston.

Electric Shower:
Sourced an unused electric shower matching a customers current faulty shower. This particular model was made obsolete a few years ago. Replacing it with a different model would have meant almost a full days worth of work. We found a like for like replacement on ebay and snapped it up. The job was done in 90 minutes.

Roller Blind Mechanism:
Sounds trivial, but you try find a single replacement part for a roller blind. It took us about two days to source a manufacturer who was willing to sell us a single component.

Tap Aerators:
If you don't know, these are the small mesh filters that you find at the end of tap spouts. We were sent a photo of a tap and asked to source the aerators without any hint of the manufacturers name.

The both are just a few of the dozens of specialist parts we source for our customers every week. Something I know other London handyman services will not do for their customers.

Hanging LCD Screens - Cheap SCART leads

One of the more specialist jobs our London handymen take on is the hanging of LCD TVs. As an added service we also offer a cable concealing service. Where our London handyman will conceal the Scart/HDMI and power cables within a surface mounted trunking or behind the plasterboard wall itself.

One issue that customers don't usually prepare for, is that the cables need to significantly longer than the ones supplied with most TVs if they are to be concealed in any way and still reach the desired accessories or power sockets. So we always ask the customer at the booking stage to ensure that they have sufficiently long cables on-site for us to be able to complete the installation.

I realised on last week, that not only is the length of the cable important but the quality of the SCART lead does affect the picture and sound quality. We arrived at a LCD fitting job in Fulham where the customer had a 5m SCART cable which he wanted concealed in trunking and connected to his sky box. Once we had fitted the TV, and connected the sky box using the 5m SCART cable supplied by the customer, we noticed that the picture quality on the LCD was not very good. We had a 1.5m SCART cable with us and so changed the SCART lead to see if it had any effect. Sure enough the picture quality improved to near perfect. I examined the packaging that the 5m SCART had arrived and noted that it had cost the customer £5.99. This obviously seemed like a bargain at the time. But it was clear that it was the cause of the poor quality picture.

Luckily there was an electrical wholesaler nearby where we managed to get a better quality 3m SCART for around £20. The end result was good and we all learnt that if you are going to spend close to £1000 on an LCD TV, its worth spending £20 on good quality cables.

Suspended Ceiling Repairs

Silver Saints prides itself on been able to solve almost any problem around homes of offices. Often the most important ingredients are experienced handymen and a flexible approach. But some problems also require a bit of research to get right.

We were asked by one of our commercial customers to repair a two large holes in their suspended ceiling having had two air conditioning units removed.

It might have looked like a simple job to them. But suspended ceilings come in a wide variety of styles which are not compatible with each other.

We sent a handyman to site armed with a catalogue showing all the possible varieties of grids and tiles. He has able to match the exact system they had and we ordered the parts we needed.

Once the parts arrived, we were able to completely restore the suspended ceiling in a matter of hours.

Good Neighbours

One of the jobs we are doing today has an interesting story behind it that I thought I would blog about.

We took a call last week from a gentleman who wanted to know what the cost and availability was for Silver Saints to supply and fit a replacement front door. He attached a photo of the current door and wanted a like for like replacement. After a bit of research we found the same door was available from Wicks in SW19. Having given him a fixed price for the supply, delivery and fitment of the new door. He agreed to go ahead with the work and asked us to contact someone else to gain access to the property as the person who lived at the address where the door was to be fitted was in hospital.

It turns out that the door had been kicked in by paramedics who needed to gain access to the property because the elderly gentleman that lived there had fallen ill and was unable to let them in.

The gentleman who had contacted us was one of his neighbours who had volunteered to arrange and pay for the replacement of the door and the person who was going to give us access to the property was yet another neighbour. They wanted to ensure that the property was secure and that the elderly resident would not have to worry about having the door replaced when he returned from hospital later in the week

Its good to know that people still go out of their way to help each other out and that a sense of community still exists within a very complex city like London.

My Day Out with the Ladder.

In case you don't know, all our handymen travel around London on either motorbikes or push bikes. One of the few drawbacks of these modes of transport is that we cannot carry step-ladders with us. This is not normally a problem as most customers have a step ladder or sturdy chair we can stand on if a bit of extra height is required.

This however was not the case for one of our customers who had just moved in to a flat in W2. Unfortunately she did not have a step ladder or much furniture yet and wanted us to install some curtain rails and replace a faulty lighting transformer.

So yesterday morning I set out from SW12 on my push bike with a trailer loaded with a 4 rung folding step ladder. Traveling through Clapham Common, over Chelsea bridge and across Hyde Park I arrived at the customers house at 9am as the Handyman Nick was just arriving.

I spent the day following Nick from job to job and even assisted in assembling some furniture at his last job of the day. After which I headed home, following the same route back through Hyde Park.

All in it was a 2 hour round trip and about 2000 calories of energy to get the ladder to W2. But I loved it.

YouTube

We have recently set up a Silver Saints Youtube chanel which will feature how 2 videos of our london handymen carrying out some of the more common jobs we take on.

We have posted our first video on how to hang a flat screen TV and aim to post a new video each week. Look out for next weeks video on changing sash cords.

Visit our chanel to view our most recent video - How to hang a flat screen TV.

Silver Saints - Londons premier handyman service.

Upgrading Electric Showers

Many Londoners have a love hate relationship with electric showers. Landlords and property developers love them, because the allow an additional shower at relatively low cost. While tenants hate them, because of their mediocre performance (especially in Winter).

Electric showers are fed cold water directly from the mains. The shower then 'instantaneously' heats the the incoming water to the desired temperature set by the user. In fact what is happening is the shower slows the flow of water down to give it enough time to heat the cold water. That is why in winter, when the incoming mains water is very cold, all you get is a trickle from the shower head.

The more powerful the rating of the shower (7.5Kw, 8.5 Kw, 9.5Kw or 10.5 Kw) the quicker it can heat up the water and the less it has to slow the flow down.

A lot of people have picked up on this fact and have opted to upgrade their poorly performing 7.5KW showers with a more powerful 10.5KW shower. Unfortunately, DIYers don't always understand the electrical implications of changing the rating of an electrical appliance to the rest of their wiring and protective devices (fuses, miniature circuit breakers). Simply, the amount of current that a cable can carry without overheating is limited mainly by the cross sectional area of the cable. Fuses and MCB are in place to protect the cable from overheating and therefore are rated to blow or trip before the electrical current gets to the cables failure current.

A 7,5 KW shower will draw a maximum current of 30Amps - 32 Amps. An installer would thus get away with a using a 32amp MCB and a 6 mm2 cable. A 10.5Kw shower would draw a maximum of 40-43 Amps and therefore would require a cable thickness of at least 10 mm2 which should be protected by a 45amp MCB. So if a person wishes to install a 10.5KW shower in place of a 7.5KW shower they should be confident that the electrical supply is capable of coping with such a change.

With a bit of domestic electrical knowledge and plumbing knowledge, upgrading an electric shower is a straight forward job. But without knowing what one is doing it can lead to a dangerous situation, mainly a fire risk.

So my advice is if you are adamant on doing the work yourself, get a competent person to check your electrics for you. Otherwise hire a professional handyman to do the whole install for you.

Sash Window Repair - Handyman London

One of the more specialist job Silver Saints London Handyman Service undertakes is the replacing of broken sash cord or sash spiral balances. As we head into summer and the temperature rises many people are opening their sash windows again after the long winter. Only to realise that the sash windows won't stay up, this is normally due to one of two things. The sash cord has broken and so the window is no longer attached to the weight or the window has been re-glazed with a thicker glass than it was first installed with and the weights are no longer heavy enough to keep the sash from sliding closed under its own weight. Both these are problems our handymen can fix.

Arriving in London six years ago from South Africa, sash windows were very new to me. In fact the only example of a sash window I had seen before was in old colonial hotels which are still scattered around South Africa. But sash windows have been around for a very long time and their popularity today is probably as high as it has ever been. In a recent search for a particular nylon sash cord I came across a specialist Sash Window design company that had an extensive history of the sash window.

The origins of the vertical sliding sash window are still subject to speculation and debate, but it would appear that the design probably derived from the much simpler horizontal sliding sash commonly known as the 'Yorkshire Sash'.

For many years it was believed that the vertical design had originated in Holland, during the later part of the Seventeenth Century. Others claimed it to be of French origin, as the word 'sash' is derived from the French word 'chassis' , meaning frame. However the French sash had not yet developed counter-balancing and the sliding sash frame was held in place by a swivel block.

The earliest recorded account may be that of W.Horman who in his 1589 'Vulgaria' wrote-"Glasen wyndowis let in the lyght.....I have many prety wyndowes shette with levys goynge up and down".

Certainly toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, sash windows were apparent in England examples include Chatsworth House (c1676 - 1680), Kensington Palace and Hampton Court Palace. Sir Christopher Wrens master joiner, Thomas Kinward, recorded possibly the earliest specification of a fully developed sash window, whilst working at Whitehall Palace. With the royal patronage and adoption by Wren, wooden sash windows soon became a fashionable status symbol across Britain and the Colonies.

Many earlier casement windows were replaced and sliding sash windows were used almost exclusively in new buildings, from royal palaces to simple cottages the sash ruled supreme and remained popular until the earlier part of this century.The sash offered many advantages, including being better suited to the wet British climate, as it can be closed down to a narrow gap, allowing for good ventilation whilst reducing the chance of rain entering. Being contained within the box, the sashes are less susceptible to distortion and rot than a hinged casement adding greatly to their life span. Aesthetically the sash is constructed from delicate sections of wood, with large areas of glass that add a certain grace, even when open they do not detract from the facade, as an open casement does.

Georgian architecture embraced sash windows wholeheartedly, improving the design from a single moving sash, with the top being fixed, to the more familiar system of two moveable sashes. Oak was the common timber used for construction, with thick glazing bars to hold the small, valuable crown glass panes, made by blowing. The 'bulls eye' formed at the centre by this manufacturing technique was commonly used at the rear of buildings. As glass manufacture improved larger panes started to appear and the ‘classic’ Georgian design consisting of six over six panes, with narrow glazing bars became the norm.

For the Victorians, box sash windows were a central focus to the character of their buildings, inside and out they lavished ornamentation and decoration on their homes. Curved horns, multi-arched heads, intricate mouldings, leaded lights and latticework started to appear in the sashes, which were often grouped into impressive bays and offset with ornate stone reveals. Graduating the size of windows from the ground upwards not only improved the perspective but also increased the amount of light to the lower rooms.

By the turn of the century the sash was the most widely used window, but since the first world war their popularity has been in decline. This decline is probanly due to the labour costs involved in their manufacture when compared to the easily mass produced wooden or metal casement window.

Given the advances in glass manufacturing and the increased efficiency of sash windows I think sash window will be around for a very long time still.

London Removal Companies Should Use More London Handymen.

Our handymen have been doing a lot of work for one particular London removal company lately. The typical jobs they ask us to do include: removing a sash window to allow access, taking down or putting up light fittings, dismantling & reassembling furniture, disconnecting dishwashers/washing machines, touching up scuff marks on walls and of course hanging pictures, paintings and mirrors.

I personally have never used a removals company, even though I've moved properties four times in the last five years. I've always opted for hiring a van and employing the help of a few friends, for a reasonable rate of a couple of beers. The only down side to this arrangement is that you will probably be called on to volunteer your own services when each of your mates move!

A quick search for removals companies in London returns pages and pages of competing companies, most offering an online quoting service. This suggests to me that it must be a fiercely competitive market. Having relationships with complimentary services must only be of benefit to a removals firm looking to get their muddy foot in the door. Moving is a traumatic experience for a lot of people and the idea of having the removals company manage every part of the move, including arranging a handyman to take things down or apart one side or put things up or together the other side must be a very attractive proposition to a potential customer.

The truth is all the removals company needs to do is pass their customers details on to us with a list of the work that needs doing at each property, we manage the whole process directly with their customer ourselves. It couldn't be a simpler service for them to offer as part of the moving package.

We hope to get a lot more work from removals firms as they struggle to out do their competitors in what promises to be a tough time ahead for any business relying on a booming property market.

Rat and Mouse Proofing - (Grey Handyman London)

Job described as 'Change washing machine connection'; arrived at the customer's address, a converted church hall; customer took me through a labrynth to reach his laundry room, on the way describing how his cleaner thought rats had chewed through the outlet duct from the tumble drier. As we neared the laundry room the smell started to hit us - seemed like an animal smell, and very strong.

In the laundry room, the tumble drier was stacked on a washing machine and the extract duct - a flexible plastic pipe - led through a couple of partitions then along a one of three shelves about 3 metres long. The shelves were stacked mainly with laundered towels and sheets, all in plastic bags. On the duct shelf some of these packages showed signs of rat droppings and damage caused by rats chewing them.

The customer said that he wanted the duct replaced with a metal one, and the area cleared out.So I started moving the laundry packages off the shelves and separating them into undamaged and damaged piles. Then - yuch, I found the body! A large rat, well decomposed, with maggots crawling over it, laying on the severely damaged duct under laundry packages.

It had obviously been living in the area (I later found the nest in the wall cavity where the duct led outside) and had died from the poison put down by the customer. The rat's body joined the pile of damaged (and badly contaminated) laundry in a couple of rubbish bags which ended up in the bins outside. The customer's vacuum cleaner then had a work out cleaning the remaining debris from the shelves, wall cavity and floor, before a new aluminium duct could be installed.

End result - cleaned out laundry area; new rat-proof duct but...still a very strong smell! I wonder how long it will take to disperse?

Hanging flat screen TV's

Hanging flat screen TV's is a job we do all the time, most times one handyman can manage on his own with a little help from the customer to offer the TV up to the bracket once it has been fitted to the wall. For someone with a good knowledge of the types of walls and the different fixings used for each wall hanging a plasma screen should be a simple DIY job but for most of our customers a lack of time and practical experience means they are far more comfortable getting one of our handymen to hang their screen professionally and neatly.

We normally estimate between 1 and 1.5 hours to hang a plasma screen (depending on the size of the screen, type of bracket and type of wall) although very large screens can sometimes take up 2 hours so you should generally be looking at between £60 and £80 + vat. We offer a fixed price for those of our customers who prefer to have peace of mind that they will not be charge anymore than a certain amount.

Our fixed price for LCD screens up 42" is £85+vat and for LCD larger than 42" we charge £100+vat.

If you have spent a fair amount on your new flat screen TV why not give us a call and get one of our handymen to hang it professionally and neatly.

The Oddest of Odd Jobs

We had one of the strangest jobs we have had so far on Wednesday of this week. A customer wanted to hire a handyman to remove their bath panel because his pet Burmese Python had escaped from its cage and slithered under the bath. His hope was that our handyman would be able to remove the bath panel so that he could retrieve his snake.

Luckily, one of our handymen, Don, has had experience with snakes. His son used to have one as a pet! So he didn't mind offering his assistance in returning the serpent to its enclosure.

Unfortunately, when Don removed the bath panel the python was nowhere to be seen! It appeared as if it had crawled even further along the waste pipe than first thought and was probably behind the tiled-over mdf boxing that had been installed to hide the bathroom plumbing.

The customer then confessed that the snake had actually been AWOL for about a month and must by now be quiet hungry. Plan B was then to try entice the snake out from behind the boxing by dangling a fresh mouse in the proximity of the entrance to the boxing in the hope that he would show himself for long enough to be captured. Our handyman did not stick around for this part of the plan. He also didn't have the heart to tell the customer that one of the jobs we do quiet a lot of in London, is mouse proofing, and that in our experience there is no shortage of rodents behind the pipe boxing in London flats. So he shouldn't be surprised if his 5ft pet snake isn't in fact starving but does actually emerge from his den as a 10ft well fed snake when he himself is good and ready!

I'm not sure what sort of licences a person needs to have a pet python in London or any other reptile for that matter. But both myself and the London mouse population would certainly be interested to know how many escape and are never seen again.

I leave you with this conundrum; if you were a tenant in a flat and your pet python escaped and you never saw him again. Would you warn the landlord and the new tenants about their co-inhabitor when you finally moved out or would you just say nothing and hope the snake has moved out as well.

Humor in the world of a London Handyman

Every so often we come across some amusing job requests and I love the fact that our customers are so confident in our service and so at ease with our handymen that they request us to do things like helping them when they have managed get their big toe stuck in the spout of their of bath tap or to open the sugar jar that has been closed too tightly. It is very rewarding to know that our customers rely on us for even the smallest/slightly embarrassing jobs.

Handymen are not without amusing moments themselves. I had a call from a customer who asked if I wouldn’t mind calling the handyman that was currently at her property to ask if he was ok and not injured in anyway. When I enquired if something had happened that he might injure himself the customer went on to explain that the handyman, who was there to fit a sash restrictor to a sash window, had been shown upstairs to the first floor where the sash window was located and then left to get on with the job. The customer went down stairs to find the handyman who she had just left upstairs letting himself in through the ground floor back door. As it turns out the handyman who had to stand on the window ledge to fit the restrictor had slipped, fallen out the window, rolled down the angled roof and landed in the flower bed in the back garden.

Thankfully it was not very high and the tightly packed flower bed provided a nice soft landing. In the end both I and the customer were in stitches when I called back to say that the handyman was perfectly fine aside from a bruised ego.

Putting Things Right

One of our handymen was asked to assemble an ikea shelving unit last week. This is normally a very straight forward job, assembling flatpack furniture is something our handyman service does all the time.

There was an added difficulty on this job however, the shelving unit was almost 2m wide and 2m high and needed to be assembled on its side and then lifted in to position. Unfortunately there was not a 2mX2m clear space anywhere in the flat we were working in. The handyman decided to attempt to assemble the wardrobe with it in an upright position. This was going well, he managed to get the outer frame together, but as soon as he tried to move the bookcase in to a position where he could add the individual shelving units the frame colapsed, damaging the laminated chipboard wood it was made from beyond repair.

Knowing the difficult conditions we were working on, the customer was understanding, but did expect us to replace the bookcase and have it assembled by the next day. We tried to explain that the most logical way to deal with this situation was for him to order a new bookcase from Ikea, have it delivered and we would put it together for him and reimburse him the cost of the replacement bookcase. But he would not accept this solution and insisted that the bookcase be replaced and assembled the following day.

So two of us set off to Croydon Ikea at 19:30 that evening, we bought a replacement shelving unit, had a couple of hot dogs and drove across London to N16 to deliver the replacement unit.

The next day our handymen returned and assembled the shelving unit, this time disassembling the bed in the room to allow enough space for the unit to be assembled on its side.

With a four hour round trip to replace the bookcase, the £110 cost of the wardrobe and the extra 1.5 hours of labour we completed the job and charged the customer a grand total of £72+VAT. I don't need the Dragon's Den panel to tell me that this equation does not equal profit, but it did equal a satisfied customer. Which at this stage of our business is just as important!

Not your average London Handyman Service

Many people who use our London handyman service for the first time are pleasantly surprised when a well spoken, polite and neatly turned out person turns up to tackle their 'to do' list.

All of our handymen come from professional backgrounds:

Don is an Oxford graduate, was a pilot in the Royal Air Force, a government liaison in China, Chairman of a Charity and also has a honours degree in french studies. He picked up most of his handyman knowledge and skills while renovating his own and friends properties. Don has been working as a professional handyman for six years now and is attracted to this job because no two days are the same.

Nick graduated from Brunel University with an engineering degree, he worked for KPMG for twenty years as a management consultant, is an avid yachtsman and skippers commercially owned yachts in his spare time. Nick describes himself as semi-retired even though he works a full five day week. The aspect of this job he likes the best is meeting new and interesting people everyday.

Robin has been in the building trade working as a Quantity Surveyor for over twenty years, he is an advanced motorcyclists and often takes groups of motorcyclists on guided trips to Europe. His depth of building and technical knowledge is massive and he pursues carpentry projects as a hobby.

It should be obvious from the profiles above that we are no ordinary handyman service, when you book a Silver Saints handyman, you are getting someone who can communicate well, is used to working in high pressure environments, has excellent problem solving skills and have chosen to do this job because they understand the importance of customer service and love DIY.

All our handymen have had successful professional careers but have left the confinement of the office behind to pursue a flexible, fun and rewarding career as a mobile professional London handyman.