Just over a third of the enquiries we receive say ASAP. It is the most common answer we get to the question of when work needs doing, ahead of "flexible" and well ahead of any actual date.
Almost none of them are emergencies. That is not a criticism — it is how people write when something has been annoying them for a fortnight and they have finally sat down to do something about it. But it is worth separating the two, because they lead to completely different answers.
A real emergency is not our job, and we will say so immediately
If water is coming through a ceiling, if a switchboard has tripped and will not reset, if there is a smell of gas, or if sewage is backing up, you do not need us. You need a licensed plumber, a licensed electrician, or in the case of gas, the gas supplier's emergency line. Those trades are licensed for a reason and the work is theirs by law.
We are not licensed for electrical, plumbing or gas work and we do not take it on. If you send us something in that category we will tell you within the same reply and point you at the right person rather than leaving you waiting on a quote that was never coming. The same goes for asbestos, tree removal, and major structural work.
This is the least commercially clever paragraph on this website and it is the most useful one. A business that says yes to everything at 9pm is not being helpful. It is being vague about what it can actually do.
What "urgent" usually means in practice
Strip out the genuine emergencies and what is left is a fairly consistent list:
- A door or window that will not lock. The house cannot be secured. This is the one we treat most seriously, because it is a security problem rather than a repair problem.
- A gate that will not latch on a boundary or a pool surround, where the gate is the thing keeping a child or a dog where they should be.
- A tenant moving in or out on a fixed date. Patching, painting and make-good that has to be finished before a handover, not soon after it.
- A property going to market. Photography is booked, the wall has a hole in it, and the date will not move.
- A trip or fall hazard — a lifted decking board, a loose handrail, a step that has come away.
- Water damage that has already been stopped. The leak is fixed by a plumber; the ceiling, the cornice and the skirting still need repairing.
These are urgent in the ordinary sense: there is a real date attached, and missing it costs money or creates a risk. They are also the ones we can usually do something about, because none of them need a licensed trade.
Why there is no emergency number on this site
You will not find a phone number anywhere on these pages, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight.
A phone that rings after hours does not make a repair happen after hours. What it produces is a conversation at 9pm in which somebody writes down half a job on the back of something and rings back the next morning to ask what the other half was. Every job we take starts as a written enquiry, which means the scope is recorded once, quoted accurately the first time, and does not quietly change between the call and the invoice.
Our working hours are Monday to Friday 7am to 5pm and Saturday 9am to 3pm. We are closed Sunday. Enquiries sent through the form outside those hours are picked up and read — the form does not sleep even though we do.
How to actually get moved up the list
If your job genuinely has a deadline, say so in the enquiry and say what the deadline is. "ASAP" tells us almost nothing, because everybody writes it. These tell us a great deal:
- "The tenant takes possession on the 19th."
- "The front door will not lock at all."
- "Photos are booked for Thursday morning."
A specific date or a specific consequence lets us slot the work sensibly against everything else already committed. A blanket ASAP does not, and the honest result is that it gets treated as normal priority.
Photographs help more than description does, particularly for anything involving a lock, a hinge, a latch or a matched material. Around eight in ten of the jobs we quote are quoted from photos without a site visit, which is faster for everyone — but only when the photos show the problem and enough of what is around it.
What we will tell you
We will give you the first realistic date, not a hopeful one. If we cannot get to something before your deadline we would rather say that at the quote stage than take the booking and disappoint you in the week that mattered.
If it is a security problem, tell us that plainly and we will treat it that way. If it is a licensed trade's work, you will know within the reply and you will know who to contact. And if the job can simply wait a fortnight without anything getting worse, we will say that too, because a repair done properly on a Tuesday is worth more than a rushed one on a Saturday.
Handy Home Heroes is based in Ardross and works across the Perth metropolitan area. ABN 88 948 290 829, $10M public liability, GST registered, rated 5.0 from 150 Google reviews.