How to house a 10-man crew in Newport | KrewBase

Ten is the number that catches people out. A six-man gang goes in one four-bed house with a futon and a sofabed and everyone copes. A thirty-man crew gets a hotel block or serviced apartment complex and an account manager to match. Ten sits in the middle: one house is too small, and nobody wants to pay hotel rates for ten tradesmen who will eat the breakfast bar out of house and home by day three.

The answer in Newport is almost always two houses close together, occasionally three. Here is how to make that work as one booking instead of a headache.

Split by crew, not by beds

The first mistake is splitting the ten men five-and-five across two identical houses. Crews do not travel in fives. Split by the work: the six-man gang on days in one house, the four-man gang — usually the second phase, the finishing team or the night-shift cover — in the other. Each house gets a lead, each lead gets the keys, and the gaffer deals with two door codes instead of ten hotel keycards.

Keep the houses within a few streets of each other. St Julians to Maindee is fine; St Julians to Malpas means the crews never share a lift, never share a breakfast, and the smaller crew starts feeling like the B-team by week three. Five minutes apart is the ceiling.

The spec does not halve, it doubles

Two houses means two washing machines, two driers, two kitchens and — the one people forget — two bathrooms per house minimum. A five-man house with one bath does not work on a 6am start; it barely works with two. Off-street parking for two vans per house is the floor, because tool theft off a Newport terrace street is not a theoretical risk. The full breakdown of what kills a booking like this is in our where crews actually stay in Newport note, and the parking rules are in work van parking.

• Days and nights together — if any of the ten are on nights, put the night crew in the quieter house, the one away from the main road. Blackout curtains in that house are non-negotiable.
• One invoice for both houses — this is the whole point of booking through one supplier. KrewBase bills the two (or three) properties as a single line item, so your accounts team sees one cost centre, not a stack of separate bookings.
• Start dates that drift — the second phase usually lands a week after the first. Book both houses from day one anyway; losing the second house over a week's overlap costs more than the overlap.
• An exit plan — if the job finishes early, both houses come off the booking together. Ask about the notice terms before you sign, not when the scaffold comes down.

What it costs, roughly

Two proper crew houses in Newport for ten men will normally come in well under ten hotel rooms, once you add hotel parking charges, breakfast markups and the crew's evening meals with no kitchen to cook in. The houses also keep the team together in the evenings, which matters more than it sounds: a crew that eats together at the house stops drifting to different pubs and different start times by week two. The wider corridor picture — junctions, drive times, which side of the river to base on — is in the M4 corridor note.

Ten men is also exactly the size where a fortnight turns into two months without anyone planning it. Take the house with the monthly rate, not the one with the cheapest week.