Footings & Excavation in Nuneaton, priced in writing before anything starts.
Groundworks is the trade where Nuneaton differs most from the towns around it, and the reason is that this town has been dug up for a very long time for three different reasons.
Coal has been mined here since the fourteenth century. Clay was dug for brick making. And granite was quarried on a scale that left Mount Judd standing as a spoil tip from the Judkins workings. The consequence for anybody putting in a foundation is that ground conditions vary sharply over short distances, and a plot three streets away tells you very little about yours.
Rock close to the surface is the most common surprise. It is excellent to found on and expensive to get through, and the difference between a dig and a break out is not a small percentage on a price, it is a different job with different plant. Backfilled ground is the opposite problem: easy to dig and not something you want to found on without knowing what is in it and how deep it goes.
Because of all that we put trial holes in before the design is fixed, not after. It is the single most useful hour anybody spends on a Nuneaton project, and it turns the largest variable in the price into a known quantity.
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 Nuneaton & Bedworth 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 footings & excavation page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Nuneaton street to the next.
Broken rock bulks up and will not compact back into the hole it came from, so muck away volumes here run higher than the same excavation elsewhere. We allow for the lorry movements the ground actually generates rather than the ones a standard rate assumes.
Nothing is dug until we know what is already down there. In a town with this much industrial history the service records are patchy, so we scan before breaking ground, which costs an hour and avoids a very bad afternoon.
Plant selection is part of the price here in a way it is not elsewhere. A mini digger that copes on ordinary ground will simply stall against rock, and sending one anyway wastes a day before anybody admits it. We match the machine and the breaker to what the trial hole showed, which is the whole reason for digging the trial hole first.
Part of our wider building work in Nuneaton.
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.
