He started with furniture.

Most people in this trade come up through building. You learn to get things standing, then you learn to make them look right, and for a lot of tradesmen the second part never fully arrives.

Alan went the other way round. He was a cabinetmaker.

Cabinetmaking is an unforgiving apprenticeship. There is nowhere to hide on a drawer front. A joint is either invisible or it is wrong, and a millimetre is a large number. You spend years being told that close enough is not a thing.

Then he learned the rest of it, because a customer who wants a fitted kitchen does not want to hire four people to get one. Plumbing. Tiling. Plastering. Door hanging. Floors. Whole barns and lofts turned into houses.

In his own words, the skills were honed working on challenging and rewarding projects such as barn and loft conversions and complete property renovations, often providing individual and innovative solutions.

What has not changed is the standard he measures against. It is still a cabinetmaker's standard, applied to a shower room in Barrow.