Heating Engineer in Appledore, North Devon

Appledore is a shipbuilding village at the mouth of the Torridge, and the old part of it was laid out long before anyone thought about where you'd put a van. Irsha Street and the lanes running down to the quay are narrow, one way in practice if not on paper, and parking is difficult most of the year and close to hopeless in August.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. Tell me where I can realistically park when you book, or which end of the street to come in from, and the visit runs to time instead of starting with a quarter of an hour of hunting.

The housing is the other constraint. Much of the old village is a conservation area, full of listed and near-listed fishermen's cottages: solid walls, shared party walls, small rooms and hardly anywhere sensible to run a flue. Boiler siting in these places is usually a compromise somebody made decades ago, and the sensible thing is to work with what's there rather than propose something the building won't take. Some properties still have a back boiler behind the fire, and I'll give you a straight view on whether one's realistically repairable before you spend anything on it.

I'm George Lane, Gas Safe registered, working on mains gas boilers. Appledore is about 21 miles by road from South Molton, so roughly half an hour.

You'll get an answer. Ring or message during the working day and you'll hear back the same day; evenings and weekends, it'll be the next working day. And if it isn't a job for me, I'll tell you that and point you at someone who can help, rather than going quiet on you.

When you book, I'll confirm it and give you a two-hour window rather than a whole day sat at home waiting. On the morning you get a text with a tracking link, so you can see where I've got to instead of wondering. Traffic and the job before yours are real, so it's a window rather than a promise to the minute, but if it slips you'll hear it from me first.