Tiptoe blog has moved!

We're pleased to say that our blog has now moved to our website. You'll still be able to get all the latest updates on the company as well as industry insight and a sneak peak into the work we do.

Why don't you check out our blog now and get the latest updates!

Lindsey, our PR/Marketing guru, has just had a 3rd baby which is why our blog is being "slightly" neglected at the moment. Congratulations to Lindsey, have fun with your baby boy, and thank you for the cute pics!

Summer Newsletter

Our Summer Newsletter is now live! Please take a look at it and forward to your friends. Of special note is an option to hire a tradesman for a day—just to complete the odd jobs around the home that you have been meaning to finish. You can click on the image below to expand the newsletter, or read it right here.

Twickenham Renovations

Our builders have just finished renovations of a two-storey detached house in Twickenham. We painted and decorated throughout the flat, including in the double reception room, above. 

Heavy structural changes were completed in the kitchen, which involved the removal of a chimney breast, enlarging the french doors, inserting six steel beams, moving fuse boards, the gas metre and boiler. We also created a new toilet room in the downstairs. Enjoy these final photos. (You can see before photos right here.)

 

Work in Progress: Twickenham

Here are photos of a project in Twickenham, documenting our building work of a two-storey detached home. We painted and decorated throughout the house, with much of our time in the kitchen making heavy structural changes. To see our final photos and find out more details, please click here.


Before:

In Progress:

After photos of this project right here.

Property Professionals: Find A Property

Continuing with our Property Professional series, we bring you an interview with Findaproperty.com's writer and blogger, Samantha Baden. Seeing as Samantha regularly updates the website with news, facts and trivia, we thought she would be the perfect person to chat with about London property.

Where are the current London property hotspots? Any postcodes or areas you would guess as a good place to invest in or the next hotspot? 
Hotspots are all about predicting growth, which is notoriously difficult, even in London where prices are more buoyant than the rest of the UK. One of the ways you can try to do this is to find out about future plans for certain areas in London. For example, proposals for a Northern line extension to Battersea in 2015 is likely to make the area far more desirable and pricey.

But my property hotspot picks are in the east and the south of the capital. Stratford in East London is an area that has benefited from quality infrastructure investment over the past couple of years—a lot of it linked to the Olympics. There's also good demand for rental properties here which means the neighbourhood works as an investment hotspot too. There's also hotspot potential along the Thames in places such as Pontoon Dock and West Silvertown, which are massive growth areas. The large number of new builds here mean properties tend to be affordable, but they are likely to hold their value as rental properties because of their proximity to Canary Wharf and the City.

Down south, Streatham is my tip for a neighbourhood to watch. Homes are still affordable compared to near neighbours Balham and Tooting, but the whole area is slowly smartening up, which means prices are likely to follow suit.

Do you have a favourite neighbourhood in London?
I'm very fond of multicultural and bustling Hackney in East London, which is home.  But I have a soft-spot for Hampstead, which manages to feel like a village, but in reality is just five miles away from the West End.

What do you think are the best ways for homeowners to increase the value of a London property?
The best way to add value to your home is to increase the square footage, so if you can add a room through a loft conversion or another type of extension then do it. Of course in London, many people live in properties that don't lend themselves to easy extensions. In this case, another option is to consider more creative renovations. For example, embracing open-plan living by moving the kitchen to the reception room and converting the kitchen into a bedroom.

You cover a lot of interesting property stories on your blog — can you share a favourite London fact?
St John's Wood is the only tube station in London that doesn't include any of the letter that spell the word mackerel. Weird, but true.

Thanks Samantha. For more Findaproperty.com news, visit the blog which is updated regularly.

Work in Progress — West London

Here's a peek into another flat we are refurbishing. A family of three recently acquired this 2-bedroom, 2.5 bathroom mansion block apartment in West London. Our builders are in the midst of a full refurbishment. In addition to the usual plastering and decorating throughout the property, we're also removing a structural wall in the reception room, adding built-in wardrobes in the reception and bedrooms, building sliding doors and cupboards, installing a brand new kitchen, reconfiguring the bathrooms (including the addition of a wet room) and adding underfloor heating.

Work in progress:

1) Complete refurbishment of the bathrooms. If you look closely at the floor of this bathroom, you'll even notice evidence of the underfloor heating we recently fitted in this bathroom. 

2) Customised, built-in wardrobes. We'll be building and fitting a wardrobe just behind the door. Perfect use of otherwise dead space. 

3) Removal of the former kitchen, install of the new kitchen to occur shortly.  

4) Pre-decoration of the hallway, leading down to the kitchen

5) The reception room, where we've recently removed a structural wall, and nearly doubled the size of the open living space. Bespoke built-in bookshelves will be added to both sides of the fireplace.