Our busiest day yet!

Yesterday we took a total of 19 bookings, our busiest day yet. We dont expect to take many bookings on a Thursday or Friday in camparison with the first half of the week so this really took us by suprise. Our previous best was 18 which was only two weeks ago Monday but we expect to be really busy on the phones on Mondays.

I'm super chuffed with this as it isets up for a good week next week and means we only have a few gaps to fill in the first half of next week. We prefer not to be booked up too many days in advance as it makes us a less effective service for our customers.

Monday and Tuesday are looking full aside from one or two small gaps but the rest of the week is fairly open so if you have any handyman jobs you need doing and you are in London why not give us call.

Summer holiday pinch.

The handyman industry traditionally quietens down over the school summer holidays. In fact I think the whole of London quietens down over this period. There is noticeably less traffic on my way to work and there seems to be less people out and about in general.

We always expect to feel a slight pinch at this time of year and take between 2 and 5 bookings less per day than we would normally expect to take on average at any other time of the year.

This years summer holidays so far have not actually been that bad for us and we have managed to keep to flow of work a lot more steady than we expected. Sure we have dropped slightly in our bookings but not as much as usual which I think may be down to the fact less people are going abroad for the summer holidays and instead opting to stay in London and use their time over the holidays differently. Weather or not this has something to do with credit crunch I hesitate to say.

I firmly believe that reputation is everything in this industry and no matter what time of year it is we will always strive to offer a service that is second to none and as long as we continue with this our fantastic regular customers will always refer us onto friends, families and colleagues helping keep the steady flow of jobs coming.

Need some help around the house or office Silver Saints' london handymen will be happy to help. We employ the most experienced handymen in London allowing us to take on almost any home and office repair or maintenance.

Silver Saints going green

Here at Silver Saints - London's premier handyman service we are very proud of our green business.

Most of our handymen travel around on motorbikes which are very economical and have very low emissions compared with your average plumber, electrician or maintenance firm in a van though we have even gone one further and have a handyman on bicycle covering mainly central London postcodes. Don, our handyman on a bicycle will tell you there is no quicker way around central London and being a cycling enthusiast myself I have to agree.

Both myself and Seamus (the other operations team member in the office) are avid cyclists and often cycle out to meet our handymen to assist them on jobs that need a second pair of hands for lifting, to drop off parts or even to deliver a ladder and we have a very neat and nifty trailer that fits behind our bikes and can carry most things a handyman would require including a 5 rung ladder!

This is just one of the many ways in which we overcome some of obstacles that other handyman services would not even attempt and we even go about it in a green, Eco friendly way.

New handymen, breakfast meetings and concealing cables in walls.

Silver Saints is growing. Today was the first day of our newest recruit, Roger. Although this is his first day as one of Silver Saints' London Handymen he has been in the handyman industry for sometime and we have come to know him and his fantastic quality of work quite well over the last year or so.

Roger will be covering mostly the South East, East and central parts of London so if you are lucky enough to live in one of these areas and book in one of our handymen it may well be Roger that turns up at your door.

Rogers' first day coincided with our monthly breakfast meeting providing a good opportunity for him to meet and sit down with all of our other handymen for a chat. This mornings breakfast meeting was a particularly good one as Silver Saints MD Seamus had planned a demonstration on concealing cables in walls. This has become quite a common request from our customers particularly when it comes to plasma and LCD installations as it is usually unsightly to simply have the cables hanging out of the bottom of the TV. We offer a range of different cable tidy solutions, the most cost effective and common of which is a surface mounted strip of conduit which comes in a variety of colors to match your wall and is relatively inexpensive but there are a lot of people who would prefer to have the cables buried in the wall which can be more time consuming and messy than people think.

Seamus has been putting a bit of thought into chasing cables into walls and decided we would experiment with a few tools that come available to make chasing cables into the wall a simpler and tidier job, at the expense of a wall (In need of repair already) at the office. In the end the demonstration went well and it gave all of the saints a pretty good idea of what is possible when it comes to hiding cables in walls and, hopefully, by the end of this week we should an addition to the services we offer fixed prices for on our Silver Saints - London Handyman website.

More YouTubing.

As of this morning the YouTube video I posted about two weeks ago on how to hang a flat screen has been veiwed 382 times. This is a fantastic result for us and we have found it has done wonders for some of our generic word searches on google so I have posted another video on YouTube which is more of a promo video than a how 2.

London handyman - Silver Saints is a selection of pics of our handymen carrying out some of the more common jobs we love to take on.

Is Jon Lewis slipping?

Yesterday I had a call from one of our handymen to say that he is with a customer who has asked him to hang a blind. Our handymen hang blinds almost everyday, it has to be up there with the most common jobs we do so they see almost all makes shapes and forms of blinds. This particular blind came from Jon Lewis and had been supplied with the incorrect brackets for the blind. This is staring to become a common feature of blinds bought from Jon Lewis and the handyman thought he would call to let me know he had run into yet another JL blind that had been supplied with the incorrect parts.

I'm not sure if there was one bad batch supplied with the incorrect parts or if JL have let their quality control slip.

If you have had similar problems with blinds bought from JL post a comment on this entry as I would be interested to know if there is something wrong with the quality control at JL or if it just coincidence that we have seen a few blinds with incorrect parts.