We started with doors

This business started with one lad, a van, and a set of internal doors.

George set up Delux Doors to do one thing properly: supply and fit internal doors across Lancashire. Not a national chain with a call centre and a six-week lead time. One person who turned up when he said he would, hung the doors right, and cleaned up before he left.

It worked because of the boring things. Being on time. Ringing back. Sweeping up. Telling someone honestly that their hundred-year-old frames were nowhere near square, and then fitting the doors so well you’d never know.

Word got round. One job in a terrace turned into the neighbour’s. Five doors turned into ten. People started leaving reviews that said the same things over and over: polite, tidy, hard-working, cleaned up after himself. Ninety-odd households later, not one of them has left a bad word.

Then people started asking

“While you’re here — could you do the flooring?” “Do you know anyone who does media walls?” “What about the kitchen?”

For a while the answer was a name and a number for someone else. But we kept hearing the same thing back: the other trade didn’t turn up, or didn’t clean up, or quoted one price and charged another. People had trusted us with their house, and we were handing them to someone who might undo all of it.

So we stopped handing them over. QikFit is the same company — same phone number, same standards, same bloke answering it — doing the rest of the house as well. Doors, flooring, kitchens, bathrooms, media walls, acoustic panelling and under-stairs storage. One firm, one point of contact, from the first knock to the last bit of sweeping up.

There’s a team behind it now

It isn’t one van any more. There’s a team of fitters behind the name, and we’re careful about who joins it — because the moment someone walks into a customer’s hallway, they are QikFit.

You can tell how it’s going by the reviews. Customers don’t just name the company any more, they name the lad who did the work. One wrote that our fitter was still there at quarter to nine on a Friday night insisting on hoovering up, and they practically had to throw him out. That’s not something you can put in a training manual. You either hire people like that or you don’t.

What hasn’t changed

We still come to you. Samples on your floor, in your light, against your walls — because a door that looks right under showroom spotlights can look completely wrong in a north-facing hallway in Darwen in February.

We still tell you when something isn’t possible rather than finding out halfway through. And we still leave your house cleaner than we found it, because that’s the bit people remember long after they’ve stopped noticing the doors.

How we price it

Straightforward jobs we can usually price while we’re still with you. Anything bigger — a kitchen, a bathroom, anything where materials need working out properly — we take away and come back to you in writing shortly after. We’d rather spend a day getting the number right than pull one out of the air on your doorstep and revise it later.

Either way, you get the price in writing before anyone starts, and that’s the price. If we want to take your old doors, units or flooring away and dispose of them, we can — that’s an optional extra and it’ll be itemised on your quote rather than sprung on you at the end.

We’re a Lancashire firm doing Lancashire houses, and we’d like to do yours.