This summer marks 25 years since I started Carvey Stukadoors. Funny thing is, I never came to Holland looking for work. I came for love. Or maybe a bit of lust as well.`

I met Joska while I was on holiday in Greece. We’re still together all these years later — although God only knows how she’s put up with me. Later, while visiting her in Holland over Christmas, I got talking to some random bloke in a bar. He asked what I did for a living. “Plasterer.”

Turns out he was a plasterer too, from a family plastering company. Before the conversation was over, he’d offered me a job. Not exactly a carefully planned career move. I’d already learned my trade back in England, but that chance conversation was how my working life in Holland started.

A few years later, I decided to take the plunge and work for myself. Carvey Stukadoors began. There was no grand business plan. I just wanted to put bread on the table, do good work, treat people properly and build a decent name along the way. One job led to another. Then another.

And somehow 25 years went by. Looking back, some of the things I value most aren’t actually the jobs. They’re the people.

Over the years I built strong relationships with some very experienced craftsmen and owners of plastering companies. We worked alongside each other, shared knowledge, helped each other out and often became good friends. Quite a few are long retired now, some in their seventies and eighties, but we still get together three or four times a year. I value that enormously.

Because the longer you stay in a trade, the more you realise that some of the best things you learn were never written in a book or on a product sheet. They were passed from one tradesman to another. Watching how somebody approached a difficult job. Asking questions. Making mistakes. Picking up little tricks. Talking rubbish over coffee. And sometimes continuing the education over a beer afterwards.

Over the years my own work has naturally moved towards the side of the trade I enjoy most — restoration, historic ceilings, ornamental plasterwork, mould making and GRG. The sort of jobs where the answer isn’t always sitting ready-made in a bag. Sometimes you have to stop, look at something somebody made generations ago and work out how the hell they did it before deciding what you’re going to do with it.

These days I’m lucky enough to have my own plaster workshop, giving me the space to make, repair, experiment and take on the specialist work I’ve always enjoyed. More and more, I find myself thinking about what comes next — how some of the knowledge freely given to me can be passed on again. Still working that one out.

After 25 years, I thought it was about time the website caught up with the work. If you fancy a look, the new website is carveystukadoors.nl

Not bad really for a holiday in Greece, a bit of love and lust, one very patient woman and a random conversation in a bar.