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A family business, one standard.
Prana Property Care is a family business, run by Ian Sharpe from Godmanchester. When you ring, you get one of us. When we quote, we are the people who will do the work. And if we come back to put something right, it is a familiar face at the door, which is rather the point of the whole arrangement.
A gap we kept falling into ourselves
This started, as these things usually do, with our own houses. Years of looking after them properly, learning which corners cannot be cut, and gradually becoming the family that friends, neighbours and relatives rang when something needed doing. A gate rehung here, a room decorated there, a garden rescued for somebody who could no longer manage it.
What kept striking us was how badly served everybody was. The trades are organised for the trades: a plasterer will not decorate afterwards, a door fitter will not straighten the crooked socket beside the door, and nobody at all wants the list of eleven small things that make a house tiring to live in. Below that sits the other option, which everyone has a story about. The one who never came back. The one who wanted cash and left a mess. The quote that doubled, the job half finished, the phone that stopped being answered.
We got tired of hearing it, and tired of watching people be let down in their own homes. Prana is the arrangement we always wanted as customers: one insured, guaranteed relationship for the whole list, priced in writing, with a network of registered specialists behind it for the work that belongs with them. So we built it.
Four habits, applied to everything
We listen before we quote
The first tool is not in the van. A walk round, a proper conversation, and an honest view of what needs doing now, what can safely wait, and what is best left alone. Half of what we are paid for is judgement, and judgement starts with paying attention.
We price the job, not the hour
Hourly billing rewards slowness and punishes tidiness. You get a fixed price in writing before we start, and if we misjudge how long something takes, that is our lesson to pay for rather than yours.
We finish things properly
The painted edge nobody will inspect. The screw slot turned into line. The dust sheets, the clean floor, and the room left better than the brief required. These are habits, not favours, and they are the whole difference between a job done and a job finished.
We know our limits
Gas belongs with Gas Safe engineers, serious electrical work with NICEIC or NAPIT registered electricians, big trees with a qualified tree surgeon. We say so plainly and bring in people we would let loose on our own homes. A tradesperson who knows their limits has none that matter.
More than one pair of hands
A family, not a workforce
Ian leads the work and quotes every job, but he is not the only one who turns up. Between us the family covers the decorating, the gardens and the hundred small finishing jobs, which is why a Room Refresh can move at the pace it does rather than waiting on one diary.
Everybody was taught the same way
Nobody arrives at your door who has not been shown how we do things: dust sheets down, radios off, the underside finished as carefully as the top, and the room left better than we found it. Standards travel through a family rather more reliably than through a rota.
A network for everything else
Beyond the family sits the trusted network built over years: a plumber, an electrician, a tree surgeon, a Gas Safe engineer and a HETAS installer. Each one has passed the only test that matters, which is that we would let them loose on our own homes.
Small enough to care, and staying that way
We are not trying to become a firm with vans and uniforms and somebody in an office deciding your job is too small. Growth is fine, but not at the price of you dealing with a stranger who has never met the person who quoted.
What would we choose if this were our own home?The question behind every recommendation
Why Prana
Prana is an old Sanskrit word for breath: the life force within all things. We use it as a metaphor rather than a philosophy, and there is no incense involved.
Every home has a life within it. Neglect drains that life slowly, a door at a time, a winter at a time, until a house that should be easy to live in quietly asks something of you every day. Thoughtful care restores it just as gradually, and usually sooner than people expect.
So the business does not simply repair houses. It helps homes breathe again. If that sounds like a large claim from people who fix hinges, spend an evening in a house where everything works and see whether you disagree.
The longer version, and the standards we hold ourselves to, are written down in The Book of Care. It is free, it is honest, and nobody has to buy anything to read it.
Close enough to care
Godmanchester is home, so Huntingdon is minutes over the old bridge and St Ives a short hop along the Ouse. Brampton, Buckden, St Neots, Papworth and the Cambridgeshire villages are all comfortably within reach. Being nearby is not a detail: it is what makes a quick second opinion, an early fix and a proper relationship practical rather than theoretical.
The best way to judge us is a small job
Start with something modest and see how it goes: how the price was explained, whether we arrived when we said, and what the room looked like afterwards. Most of our work grows from exactly that.