Renovations & Refurbishments in Banbury, priced in writing before anything starts.
Renovating a stone building in the Banbury area is mostly a matter of undoing what somebody helpful did to it in the 1970s.
Local ironstone is soft and porous, and it was built to handle water by absorbing it and letting it evaporate away again. The lime mortar around it was deliberately softer than the stone, so that any movement or salt damage happened in the joint, which is cheap to replace, rather than in the stone, which is not.
Cement pointing reverses that completely. The joint becomes harder than the stone, water that gets in cannot get out through the mortar, and it leaves through the face of the stone instead, taking the surface with it. The result is the crumbling, spalling stonework people ring us about, and it is almost always a consequence of the repair rather than of the weather.
The same applies to coatings. Any impermeable paint or sealer on ironstone traps moisture behind it and accelerates exactly the decay it was sold to prevent. There is no product that fixes a damp stone wall by sealing it.
Doing it properly means raking out cement carefully without damaging the arrises, repointing in a lime mix matched to the stone, and accepting that it is slower work than the job that caused the problem. We will also tell you honestly where pointing does not need touching at all, which on stone is more often than people expect. More on our renovation and refurbishment page.
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 Cherwell 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 renovations & refurbishments page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Banbury street to the next.
We test a sample panel of pointing and let you look at it before the whole elevation is done. Lime mortar changes colour considerably as it cures, and a decision made off a wet sample is a decision made twice.
Lime work is weather dependent in a way cement is not. It cannot be done in frost and it needs protecting while it cures, which means the programme follows the season rather than the diary. We would rather tell you that in February than start and cover it up.
Internally these buildings bring solid walls, lime plaster and floors that have moved over a long life. Insulating a solid stone wall has a moisture consequence if it is done without thought, and we explain that once at the start.
Part of our wider building work in Banbury.
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.
