You might think after enough years that you can price a refurbishment in a familiar village from photographs and a survey. You can’t. Two Whitchurch cottages on the same street can have entirely different fabric, wildly different fenestration histories, and very different drainage assumptions.

Walking the building beats inferring from the postcode every time. Even on a project where the headline scope looks routine, the site visit reliably catches the half-dozen specifics that would otherwise be variations on month two.

If you’ve had a Whitchurch project priced from a drive-by and the number is suspiciously friendly, a second opinion is rarely wasted.