Flooring in Burbage, priced in writing before anything starts.
Floors in the Burbage core have a problem that comes directly from the buildings standing on the footpath.
Where a house fronts straight onto a pavement, the external ground level at the front is fixed by the highway, and over a couple of centuries of resurfacing that level has usually risen. On more than a few of these cottages the pavement now sits close to, level with, or above the internal floor. That puts moisture into the front wall and into the edge of the floor, and it is the single most common cause of a damp ground floor in a village core property.
It matters for flooring because covering that up with an impermeable finish moves the problem rather than solving it. We look at what is happening at the front wall before specifying a floor, and where the level is the cause we say so, even though the honest answer is sometimes a more involved job than the one you asked about.
Elsewhere the usual applies. Suspended timber floors need their sub-floor ventilation working, and blocked air bricks take the joist ends in the end. The estate housing has solid floors where flatness and moisture are the questions and most need levelling before a hard covering.
Timber acclimatises in the house before it is fixed. Our flooring page covers the preparation underneath the finish.
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 Hinckley & Bosworth Borough 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 flooring page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Burbage street to the next.
Flooring is the last trade in and the easiest to ruin, so we programme it late and protect it once down. In a small cottage with one route through, we lay in sections so there is always a dry way from the front door to the stairs.
Acclimatisation needs somewhere dry to stand for several days, which in a small village house is a genuine planning question rather than an afterthought. We work out where it goes before it is delivered.
In a cottage altered repeatedly over two centuries, floor levels rarely match from room to room. Thresholds are where that shows, and a difference of fifteen millimetres between a hall and a living room is both a trip hazard and the thing you will notice every day. We resolve the levels in the preparation rather than hiding them under a strip of trim at the end.
Part of our wider building work in Burbage.
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.
