Flooring in Kettering, priced in writing before anything starts.
Floors in Kettering are another place where the grade of house decides the sensible answer.
In the larger Victorian houses the original boards are usually good quality softwood over generous joists, and a great many are still there under whatever was laid on top later. Lifting, cleaning and relaying them frequently produces a better floor than anything that could be bought to replace them and costs less than a good engineered board, so we look before we specify.
In the artisan housing the boards were plainer and the joists lighter, and they have often been cut about by generations of plumbers and electricians. There the honest answer is more often a new floor properly laid over a structure that has been checked and strengthened where needed.
Sub-floor ventilation is the routine check on either. The air bricks are doing a job and the number rendered over, planted in front of or built up against by a later extension is remarkable. Block them and the joist ends begin to go, and a beautiful floor over a rotting one is money wasted.
On the later estate housing the floors are solid and the questions become flatness and moisture instead. Our flooring page covers the coverings and the preparation that goes under them.
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 North 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 flooring page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Kettering 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 an occupied house we lay in sections, keeping a dry route from the front door to the stairs throughout.
On any solid floor we test for moisture before laying rather than trusting the look of it, because a slab can appear perfectly dry and still be wet enough to lift an adhesive.
Timber acclimatises in the building before it is fixed, and it needs somewhere dry to stand for several days, which in a small terraced house is a genuine planning question rather than an afterthought.
Where original boards are worth saving we say so, even though lifting and relaying them is more work for us than laying a new floor, because on the larger houses here they are usually better than anything we could buy to replace them.
Part of our wider building work in Kettering.
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.
