Handyman Odd Jobs

The List of Jobs You Have Been Putting Off

Almost every home in Middlesbrough has a list of small jobs that have been quietly waiting for attention for months or years. The shelves you bought from IKEA that are still in the box. The picture frame that has been propped against the wall since you moved in. The curtain pole that pulled out of the plasterboard one breezy morning. The bathroom extractor fan that has been clicking ominously for a year. The cat flap your daughter has been promised. None of these jobs are big enough to justify booking a tradesman in the traditional sense, and that is precisely the gap we exist to fill.

We are happy to come out for a single job that takes twenty minutes, and we are equally happy to come out for a half-day's work where we churn through twelve different odd jobs in a single visit. Most customers find that approach far more cost-effective: instead of spending a fortune on six separate callouts, you batch the lot into one visit and we work through your list. We bring the kit, the screws, the rawl plugs, the spirit level and the patience.

Typical Odd Jobs We Handle

After fifteen years in this trade, we have seen most of what a domestic property can throw at us. The rest of this section is a fairly long list, and it is not exhaustive — if your job is not on it, ask us anyway, because the chances are we have done something similar. Note that some of these tasks bleed across into our other services: heavy plumbing work has its own page, as does electrical work, painting and decorating and so on. The jobs below are the ones that do not really fit into a tradesperson category but still need doing properly.

• Hanging pictures, mirrors, shelves and floating units (with the right fixings for the wall type)
• Putting up curtain poles, blinds and tracks, including bay-window tracks
• Hanging cabinets, cupboards and noticeboards
• Cat flap and dog flap installation in doors and walls
• Filling cracks in plaster, ceilings and corners ready for redecoration
• Fitting smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms and heat alarms
• Fixing squeaky floorboards and creaking stairs
• Tightening loose stair handrails and replacing newel posts
• Replacing or adjusting door handles, latches and locks
• Fitting letter plates and door numbers
• Adjusting kitchen cupboard doors that have dropped or rub
• Fitting blinds, including roller, Roman and venetian styles
• Replacing toilet seats, towel rails and bathroom accessories
• Filling holes in plasterboard ready for redecoration
• Fitting a TV bracket on a wall
• Wallpaper repair and patching
• Damp-proofing minor problem areas
• Fitting draught excluders to internal doors

Hanging Things Properly

Half of the odd-job calls we get in Middlesbrough are because someone has tried to put something up on the wall and either it has fallen down or they have given up because it would not stay up. The cause is almost always the wrong fixing for the wall type. Solid brick walls, breeze-block walls, plasterboard with timber studs and plasterboard with metal studs all need different fixings, and a screw that holds eighty kilograms in one wall will not hold three kilograms in another. We carry a full range of fixings on the van and we use a stud detector and a metal/cable detector before drilling, every time, without fail. The result is shelves that stay up and televisions that do not pull free of the wall on a Sunday afternoon.

Why Use a Handyman for Small Jobs

There is a financial and an environmental case for using a handyman rather than calling out a specialist tradesman for every individual job. Specialists charge specialist rates, often with a minimum charge that makes a fifteen-minute job rather expensive. A general handyman is happy to take on a mixed list of small tasks at a normal hourly rate, and to bring them all together into a single visit. We carry stock for almost every job category, so most visits do not require a separate trip to the merchant. And we are insured to do the work, which is more than can be said of the friend-of-a-friend who keeps promising to come round one weekend.

Booking, Pricing and Areas

Most odd jobs in Middlesbrough are charged at our standard hourly rate, with materials added on at trade cost. We can usually offer an indicative price by email if you tell us what is on the list, and we never charge a callout fee for jobs we go on to carry out. We cover the whole of Teesside: Middlesbrough itself, Stockton-on-Tees, Thornaby, Yarm, Eaglescliffe, Ingleby Barwick, Redcar, Marske, Saltburn, Guisborough and the East Cleveland villages. Get in touch via the contact form on this site or by email, and we will do our best to get to you within the next day or two.

Frequently Asked Questions