Bleasdale Wand Limited

Always used Bleasdale Wand when I had my own practice and found them professional, approachable and reasonably priced. Always at the end of the line if there were any queries.

I have used the services of Simon and Dyane from Bleasdale Wand several times over the past 5 years, for both personal and professional projects. Our self-build project was built on the site of an existing, ruinous watermill and was a complex project where the existing walls of a Scheduled Monument needed to be retained and protected whilst supporting a new timber frame, three storey house with roof garden and large open spans. Parameters set by Historic England and the Environment Agency had to be adhered to, as well as taking into account the only site access to get a considerable amount of plant and material over was a Grade II listed, narrow, stone arch bridge.Strip foundations, footing specification (which meant GF levels had to be raised 700mm from existing ground levels), a reinforced capping ring beam and block-and-beam floor were all designed with solid recommendations throughout.At a later date, after much frustration working with the in-house engineer working for our timber framer, Bleasdale Wand stepped in and drastically reduced the size of the 3 huge exposed beams on our ground floor by changing UBs to UCs, giving us 300mm extra to play with in our downstairs ceiling heights. Despite the reduction, the works still allowed for the desired upper floor with 4 bedrooms and a full 90m2 roof garden. Crucially, it meant maneuvering the largest 1.9tn, 9.5m long beam into place was much easier (and less expensive) than it could have been. The Bleasdale Wand team were accommodating and un-patronising when we were in a frustrating and time-strapped situation.The professionalism of both Simon and Dyane is commendable. They were thorough and trustworthy during a testing time of a self-build project. I cannot fault their service and will continue to recommend them to my clients and employ their services for my own future projects.

I am an Architect based in South Lakeland working across both residential and commercial sectors and have worked with Bleasdale Wand over multiple projects. They are competent, produce work for when they say they are going to, and they keep design simple whilst suggesting cost effective solutions. They are easy to deal with and quick at getting back to you with queries. I have used them for my own projects, and recommend them to all of our clients if they are need of a Structural Engineer.

Its with a slight heavy heart I write this as Brian was very fair, Simon Wand on the other hand is a different story, he engineered our roof as shown on Grand Designs, the brief was geodesic, in fact what we ended up with was a rather clunky bowstring truss, less than 10 which Simon decided was worth £6000 for his time, Simon was very keen to be involved in the beginning, to be fair we thought we were getting Brian as we found Simon a little unapproachable, regrettably we went with him, mid way Simon didn't seem to support his own design, by adding he would just put purlins up, there was no pre arrangement to pay fees of £6000 when he started, and took the option to thrust his bill upwards, (make sure you get a price from him, he is soulless). Knowing we had a tight budget and funds he brought someone to court who had no means to defend, we paid the full amount, thanks Simon for daylight robbery, I wish I had done it myself, actually just finished a geodesic structure, engineers cost in France 600 Euros and a much more refined structure. The dome house roof idea in principal is good, I never liked the heavy structural solution Simon came up with, it was a result of a mediocre engineer and painful experience, and finally why so long, I have been waiting to review Simon for 9 years, he has just come onto Google.

My husband and I used this company for services of structural engineering for a number of projects about five in total including a school project in Windermere and calculations for stairs foundations for a house and a number of other schemes, all was well until Simon Wand was involved with a roof structure and was slightly embarrassed by an interview for the media, he immediately went from we will charge a reasonable fee to ridiculous requests for payments, a great shame.