Careful building for period homes and difficult sites around Fowey.

An old bathroom taken back to the joists and rebuilt as a walk-in shower room.

The room had a bath across one wall, a tired suite, a toilet that relied on a macerator and a floor nobody had looked under for decades. The brief was a walk-in shower, warmth underfoot and walls without a grid of tile joints.

We stripped it out and opened the floor first, because a stone floor is only as good as what it sits on. Rotten joists and boards were replaced and the rest strengthened and levelled. The macerator went: we ran an entirely new waste pipe beneath the floor to meet the soil pipe outside, so the toilet now drains properly by gravity. A new subfloor went down, and a new stud wall carries the shower valve and pipework out of sight.

Wet underfloor heating, run from the central heating, went down beneath natural stone tiles on a decoupling membrane, which lets an old timber floor move without cracking the stone.

The walls are microcement rather than tile, with a shelf recessed along the length of the shower. Brass fittings, a single glass screen and a basin on a timber vanity finish it.

• Joists replaced, strengthened and levelled
• New gravity waste in place of a macerator
• Wet underfloor heating under natural stone
• Microcement walls, recessed shelf

A level deck at door height on a garden that falls away to the estuary.

The patio doors of this house opened onto a slope. The brief was to walk straight out onto something level, with room for a table and the view kept clear.

The deck is carried on posts set on concrete pad footings dug into the bank, with a braced frame and joists at door-sill height. The boards are treated softwood, with redwood newel posts and a slatted balustrade round three sides, and steps down to the lawn at the house end.

• Concrete pad footings on a slope
• Braced post-and-beam frame
• Treated softwood deck, redwood balustrade
• Level with the door sill

Retaining walls, a treatment plant and the drainage for a steep plot.

Nothing could be built on this site until the ground was held back and the drainage was sorted. We ran the job from start to finish, working on a slope with a mini digger and getting concrete to places a lorry couldn't reach easily.

We built tiered gabion walls to retain the bank, shuttered and poured a reinforced concrete wall, set precast chamber rings, and installed a sewage treatment plant on a concrete base with the pipe runs to and from it.

New treatment plants need Building Regulations approval and have to meet the general binding rules for small sewage discharges. Both are planned and priced in from the start, not discovered halfway through.

• Tiered gabion retaining walls
• Shuttered reinforced concrete
• Treatment plant and drainage runs
• Precast chambers