Joiner, carpenter or handyman: who do you actually need?

Something wooden needs building, hanging or fixing - so do you search for a joiner, a carpenter or a handyman? Three job titles, plenty of overlap, and a surprising amount of confusion. Here is the plain-English version.

The traditional difference

In the traditional trades, a joiner makes things - doors, windows, staircases, furniture - typically cut and assembled on a bench, then fitted in the house. A carpenter builds with timber on site: roof structures, stud walls, floor joists, decking frames. A handyman is defined by breadth rather than depth - the person for the long list of small jobs no single trade wants.

In practice, especially outside the cities, the lines blur. A good rural tradesman has always been part joiner, part carpenter, part handyman - because a Cumbrian village cannot support three separate vans, and because most household jobs need a bit of each.

Which jobs belong to whom

Call it joinery

• Internal and external doors made to fit, hung and finished
• Made-to-measure shelving, storage and window boards
• A hardwood door canopy, a new back door, a bespoke gate
• Anything in an old house where nothing is square and everything must be scribed

Call it carpentry

• Decking frames and fencing - structural timber, outside, built for weather
• Stud partitions, floorboard repairs, joist-level fixes
• Sheds and garden buildings built from scratch

Call it the handyman list

• Doors eased, locks and handles swapped, drawers un-stuck
• Shelves, curtain rails, mirrors and flat-pack assembled
• The whole odd-job list - wooden or otherwise

Why one person doing all three works

Most real household jobs cross the boundaries anyway. A sticking door might need the hinge repacked (handyman), the door eased (joiner) and a floorboard fixed underneath (carpenter). Dave is a joiner before anything else - customers have had whole door sets replaced, hung and oiled, and one-off pieces built from a photograph - but the same visit happily absorbs the carpentry and the odd jobs around it. One conversation, one quote, one pair of hands - anywhere in Cumbria.