King's Lynn: a barn conversion first floor, and seven apartments at South Lynn

The brief

A barn with no first floor and no room to waste

In August 2024 AJB Group carpenters crossed the border into Norfolk to start a barn conversion just outside King's Lynn for a valued client, Eastern Construction Consultants. The building was tight. The brief was to put a habitable first floor into it, giving two bedrooms and an en-suite upstairs, without losing usable space anywhere.

That is the defining constraint of a barn conversion. You are not building to a plan, you are building into a structure that already exists, is not square, is not level, and was never designed to carry domestic floor loads. The joist layout has to be resolved against what is actually there, and every millimetre of head height and floor area has to be argued for.

The King's Lynn area is familiar ground. Back in 2021 AJB Group led the full carpentry contract on seven apartments just outside South Lynn, so the barn was a return to a town the team already knew.

What we did

A traditional joist set, re-installed

The carpenters made a start by re-installing a traditional set of joists to create the first floor. Traditional solid timber was the right choice over an engineered system here: solid joists can be cut, notched, packed and scribed on site to suit a structure that does not match its own drawing, and in a tight building that flexibility is worth more than the extra clear span an engineered joist would give you. The team was enrolled with the task of really making use of all the space available in such a tight building as it is.

That is the core of AJB Group's floor joist work: getting a structural floor into a building that was never meant to have one.

Complete first fix

Behind the floor came the rest of the shell. Within a week the first fix team was flying, with structural floors, ceilings and external walls going up across the barn. A complete first fix followed, which on a conversion means the stud walls, the ceiling structure and the timber that everything else in the building will later be fixed to.

Seven apartments at South Lynn

The earlier King's Lynn contract, at South Lynn, ran to seven apartments, a mix of two and three bed. AJB Group led the full carpentry contract on the job. The first storey joist sets went in over the summer of 2021 and the roofs were completed by the back end of that summer. When the scaffolding was finally dropped in December 2021, it revealed the true size of the job for the first time, and the team went into a massive push to complete the first fix and finish the whole job for early 2022.

Norfolk as a working county

King's Lynn is not an outlier. Norfolk is one of AJB Group's three core counties alongside Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, and by 2025 the company had active projects running across Peterborough, Spalding, King's Lynn, Wells, Thetford, Leicester, Ramsey, North London and Kent at the same time.