Flooring in Leamington Spa, priced in writing before anything starts.
Floors in Leamington raise questions that do not come up in most towns, because a lot of the town’s ground floors are not at ground level.
In a lower ground floor room the slab or the timber sits partly below external ground, and moisture arrives from the sides as well as from underneath. Laying an impermeable covering over that without addressing it traps the moisture and moves the problem into the walls. We establish what is happening before choosing a build up, because the wrong floor in a Regency basement will fail and take the skirtings with it.
Above that level the older housing has suspended timber floors over ventilated voids, with the usual Leamington complication that the air bricks are often behind a lightwell or a later render patch and no longer doing anything. Block the ventilation and the joist ends go. We check before laying.
Regency joist spans are long by modern standards and have usually been cut about by two centuries of plumbers. A floor that bounces is telling you something, and levelling compound will not fix it.
The later housing has solid floors where the questions are flatness and moisture, and most need levelling before a hard covering goes down. 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 Warwick District 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 Leamington Spa street to the next.
Flooring is the last trade in and the easiest to ruin, so we programme it late and protect it once it is down. In an occupied townhouse with one staircase we lay in sections, so there is always a dry route from the front door upstairs rather than a floor nobody can cross for a week.
If underfloor heating is wanted, decide it before the build up is fixed. In a Regency room with tall doors the headroom cost of an overlay system matters less than usual, which occasionally makes Leamington an easier town for it than most.
In a converted townhouse, a floor is also a neighbour’s ceiling, and the sound transmission that a hard covering creates is a common source of trouble between flats. Acoustic underlay is not an upgrade in that situation, it is the thing that keeps the peace, and the lease may well require it.
Part of our wider building work in Leamington Spa.
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.
