Footings & Excavation in Daventry, priced in writing before anything starts.
Groundworks decide whether everything after them runs to programme, and in Daventry there are three things we look at before quoting.
Trees come first. On shrinkable clay a foundation near a mature tree has to go deeper than the standard depth, sometimes considerably deeper, and occasionally the answer is a different foundation altogether. On the estates this catches people out more than it should, because the trees planted when the estate went up in the 1960s and 1970s are now fifty years old and very much large enough to matter. This is the single most common reason a groundworks price moves between quotation and dig, so we establish it with a trial hole rather than assume it.
Ground history is the second. Estate development means made up levels: ground that was cut and filled when the site was laid out, which is not always the ground you would choose to found on. We dig to find bearing rather than to reach a figure on a drawing, and the building inspector will want to see the same.
Access is the third, and here Daventry is usually kind. Most estate plots will take a machine, which keeps the cost down. In the older core and behind the village cottages it can become a hand dig, which is several times the labour for the same hole and belongs in the price from the start.
Everything is inspected before it is covered. Our footings and excavation page explains our approach.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the West Northamptonshire Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our footings & excavation page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Daventry street to the next.
Muck away needs a grab lorry with somewhere legal to stand. On an estate that is usually straightforward; in the town centre it is a highway matter for West Northamptonshire Council, and in the villages the question is whether the lorry can get down the lane at all. We work all of that out at quotation stage and put it in the price.
Nothing gets dug until we know what is already down there. Gas, water, electricity and telecoms run through these gardens in positions that often bear little relation to the record drawings, and on an estate laid out in one go the service runs frequently cut across plots rather than following them. We scan before breaking ground. It costs an hour and it avoids the kind of afternoon that ends with an emergency crew and no water on the street.
Part of our wider building work in Daventry.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
