Taking over another tradesperson's work is rarely straightforward, and this was one of the harder examples. We arrived hoping to upgrade what was already there and save Pia some of the money she had already spent. Once we got into the build it became obvious that wasn't honest advice — the framing was wrong, the groundworks were poor, and patching it would have left her with a stable yard that wouldn't last. We made the call together to strip it back and start again.

The groundworks were the one thing we couldn't redo, so we worked carefully around the existing slab and made sure every load above it was sized correctly. We rebuilt the timber frame from scratch, reusing roughly a quarter of the original timber where it was sound, and upsized the structure to carry both the weight of the horses leaning against it and a planned solar PV array on the roof. Pia was kept in the loop the whole way through — every defect we uncovered, every change to spec, every cost implication.

The site itself made the job tougher. No water, no electric, an open field, and a December-to-March programme. We worked through it and handed over a U-shaped stable block built to last, ready for the horses to move in and ready for solar.