Ian and Sofia hold IMI accreditation; Sofia holds ATA Gold in structural repair and both are certified for aluminium. The workshop is BS 10125 assessed, which is the British Standard for vehicle body repair and the thing an insurer is actually checking when it says "approved". We carry £5 million public liability and £2 million motor trade road-risk cover, so your car is insured while it is with us and while it is being road-tested. Certificates are on the wall in the office; copies go out by email on request, and we would rather you asked than assumed.

Paintwork is guaranteed for as long as you own the car against lifting, blistering, delamination and loss of adhesion, and it transfers to a new owner with the invoice. Workmanship on structural and mechanical fitting is three years. What is not covered is honest: stone chips, kerbing, a new impact, and paint damage caused by something corrosive being left on the surface — bird lime on a hot day will etch a fresh clearcoat within hours, which is why the handover sheet says to remove it immediately and why we hand you a bottle of detailer with the keys.

Every structural repair leaves with a printed report from the jig: the manufacturer’s reference dimensions, the figures we measured before starting, the figures after, and the tolerance. It is three pages of numbers that most clients file without reading, and it is the single most valuable document we produce — at resale it is the difference between "it had a knock" and "here is what was done and what it measures now". We keep our own copy indefinitely, so if you sell the car in nine years we can reissue it.

Tell us on the forecourt if you can see it at handover; the car goes straight back in and nothing is signed. After collection, ring and bring it back — we do not run a complaints process because a complaints process is a way of slowing something down. In twenty-eight years the honest tally is a handful of cars a year that come back, nearly always for a nib or a piece of dust in clear that we should have caught, and one properly bad job in 2011 that we stripped and redid at our own cost over eleven days. We keep the photographs of that one in the office, which visitors find odd and we do not.

Refinishing is a solvent business and pretending otherwise would be silly. What we can control, we do: waterborne basecoat since 2009, which cut solvent use by roughly seventy per cent; a recovery still that reclaims gun-wash for reuse; extraction filtered to the standard the environmental permit sets and tested annually; and paint waste, filters and rags collected as hazardous waste under consignment note by a licensed contractor. The booths are gas-fired with heat recovery, which is the largest single item on our energy bill and the one most worth spending on. None of this is a selling point so much as a licence condition — but the permit numbers are on the office wall with everything else, and you are welcome to read them.