What this site is, and how an enquiry actually travels

This site covers one narrow subject: dry rot, wet rot and woodworm in buildings across the Scottish Central Belt. It is not a general builder's website and it does not pretend to be one. It is a specialist directory for timber decay work, which means the guidance on it is written to be accurate, and the enquiries that come through it go to the approved local team covering that postcode.

The site and the firms carrying out the work are run separately. Saying so is not a disclaimer buried at the bottom of a page, it is the thing that explains everything else here: why there are two teams rather than one, why the area chooser exists, and why no page outside the West and the East carries a telephone number.

Two teams, and no pretending to be a national chain

The Central Belt is small on a map and awkward in practice. A firm working out of Glasgow can be at a tenement in Govanhill inside half an hour and will still lose most of a day getting to a colony flat in Leith and back. Timber decay work makes that worse, because the first visit is a survey, the second is the job, and a repair that opens up wider than expected needs somebody who can come back next week rather than next month.

So the site works as two halves. One approved local team covers the West, from Glasgow out to Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Stirling. Another covers the East, meaning Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife and the Borders. Your postcode decides which one gets your enquiry, and nothing else does. There is no third team held in reserve and no coverage further north or south, because claiming a national footprint we do not have would be the easiest lie on this page and the first one you would catch us in.

What happens after you send the form

1. The postcode routes it.The form carries no branch of its own on a page like this one. The postcode you type is what assigns the enquiry to the West team or the East team. If a postcode is not one we recognise, the enquiry is marked unassigned rather than guessed at, and somebody reads it and tells you honestly that it is outside the area.
2. Somebody rings you back.Usually within one working day. That first call is not a sales call. It exists to work out what you are actually looking at, and whether you need anybody out at all. A fair share of calls end with a suggestion and no appointment.
3. A survey happens before a price does.Somebody comes out, opens up enough to see what is going on, and traces where the water is getting in. In this trade the visible damage is the end of the problem rather than the extent of it, so a figure given before that point is a guess dressed up as a quote.
4. You get the findings in writing.What was found, what it means, and what putting it right would involve. That report is yours whether or not you go ahead with any work, and it is written to be usable if a lender or a home report query has asked for a specialist timber report.

What the site is for

Getting somebody who knows the difference between the three problems to look at your timber before you spend money on it.

That is the whole purpose, and it is worth being blunt about why it matters. The three problems look alike to anybody who does not meet them weekly, and they are not alike at all. Wet rot stays where the water is and stops when the timber dries, so fixing the leak and cutting out the soft timber is frequently the entire job. Dry rot, Serpula lacrymans, is the only one that can travel through masonry away from the damp that started it, so the repair almost always reaches further than the stain you can see. Woodworm is beetle larvae, and the question that decides the cost is not whether there are holes but whether anything is still alive behind them.

Treat the wrong one and you have paid for nothing. Treat dry rot as though it were wet rot and you have paid to hide something that carries on spreading behind the new plaster. An hour of somebody competent looking is the cheapest part of this entire process, and on a good number of enquiries it is the end of it.

Why there is no phone number on this page

Because the right number depends on where you are, and a single number on a national page sends a caller in Kirkcaldy to a team based in Renfrewshire. Rather than guess from a location lookup, which is wrong often enough to matter and gives the reader no way to correct it, national pages carry the area chooser instead. Pick your side of the country and you land on thecontact page for the team that actually covers it. The enquiry form works from anywhere on the site and routes itself, so it is the faster route regardless.

What this site will not do

• No cold calling. Nobody rings you because you read a page. The only call you get is the one you asked for by sending the form.
• No pressure. No countdown timers, no invented shortage of appointments, no calling back three times in a week. The urgency in this trade is real when it is real, and inventing it on the pages where it is not would make the pages where it is worth nothing.
• No quoting without looking. Not from a photograph, not over the phone, not from a description. Anybody who will price your rot sight unseen is pricing their own risk, not your building, and it shows up later.
• No selling your details on. Your enquiry goes to the approved local team covering your postcode so they can contact you about it. It does not go to a list, a broker or anybody else. The privacy noticesets out exactly what is collected and why.
• No invented credentials. There are no reviews on this site, no case studies and no star ratings, because there are none yet that anybody actually left. When there are, they will be real ones.

What we cannot tell you yet

An About page is normally where a firm lists how long it has been trading and what it belongs to. This one will not, because the site is written before those details can be verified, and publishing them unverified would be worth less than leaving the gap visible. The following are held open until they can be filled in from a real source:

• Who operates this site, in full:to be confirmed
• The approved local teams, their qualifications, insurance and any trade body membership:to be confirmed
• What the workmanship guarantee covers and for how long:to be confirmed

Until then, what the site is willing to promise is the process rather than the provenance: somebody looks before anybody prices, you get the findings in writing, and the work stays within the Central Belt. If you would rather ask a question than book anything, the contact pageis the place to start, and telling the two rots apart is where most people find they need to begin anyway.