Fewer people are moving house right now, and it shows in the calls we get. Stamp duty, mortgage rates, the general faff of chain-buying — a lot of it has pushed homeowners towards making better use of what they’ve already got rather than starting again somewhere new. At Lion and Leinster, that shift has quietly become most of our workload.

The Rise of the Garage Conversion

It’s most obvious with garage conversions in London, where we’re regularly called out to garages that have spent years storing a bike, a few tins of half-used paint and a box of Christmas lights nobody’s touched since before the pandemic. With the right approach, that same space becomes a home office, a snug, a gym, or an extra bedroom — usually for a fraction of what a full extension would cost.

We see much the same pattern with garage conversion work across Kent, often from families who’ve simply run out of room. A second child, someone working from home permanently now, a parent moving in — none of them particularly want a new mortgage, so the garage becomes the obvious answer instead. Out towards Weybridge the story’s similar again, though the garages themselves tend to be bigger there, which usually means a proper extra room rather than a box room with a window stuck in.

Worth being upfront about this: a garage conversion looks simple on paper and rarely is in practice. Building control sign-off, proper insulation, sorting the damp course, matching floor levels with the rest of the house — skip any of that and you’ll know about it within a year. It’s the difference between a conversion that adds genuine value and one that just looks fine in photos. We’ve picked up a fair amount of garage conversion enquiries from Kent more broadly too, which tells us this isn’t a one-off trend so much as how people are choosing to live now.

Kitchens: A Different Job, Same Principle

Sutton’s kept us busy on the kitchen side for a similar reason. Some jobs are straightforward refits — new units, a new worktop, better lighting, all within the existing walls. Others go further: knocking through to the dining room, adding an island, opening the back of the house up to more light. Whatever the scale, the brief from most kitchen installation clients in the area is fairly consistent — good finishes, minimal disruption, and a timeline that actually holds up once the work starts. Local kitchen fitters hear that a lot, we’d guess, because it’s the one room in the house people can least afford to be without for long.

One Team, Start to Finish

We’re Lion and Leinster property and building services, though that always sounds grander than the actual day-to-day, which is mostly turning up when we said we would and doing what we promised. The advantage of using one contractor for both the structural side and the fit-out is that nothing gets lost between trades, and you’re not chasing three different companies to find out why the plasterer hasn’t shown up.

If you’ve been putting off asking about a garage conversion or a kitchen refit, get in touch and we’ll come and have a proper look — no obligation, just an honest read on what’s realistic and what it’s likely to cost.