Flooring in Leicester, priced in writing before anything starts.
Floors in Leicester’s Victorian and Edwardian housing are usually better than the owner expects, and that changes what the sensible answer is.
These houses were built with decent quality softwood boards over generous joists, and a great many of them are still there under whatever has been laid on top since. Before specifying a new covering we look at what is underneath, because lifting, cleaning and relaying original boards often produces a better floor than anything that could be bought to replace them, and costs less than a good engineered board.
Sub-floor ventilation is the routine check. The air bricks are doing a job, and on these plots they are regularly blocked by a raised patio, a later extension or fifty years of border planting. Block them and the joist ends begin to go, and a beautiful floor over a rotting one is money wasted.
In a converted flat a floor is also somebody else’s ceiling, and the sound transmission a hard covering creates is a common source of trouble between neighbours. Acoustic underlay is not an upgrade there, it is the thing that keeps the peace, and the lease may well require it.
On the later estate housing the floors are solid and the questions are flatness and moisture instead. Our flooring page covers the coverings we fit 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 Leicester City 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 Leicester 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 rather than closing the ground floor for a week.
Timber acclimatises in the building before it is fixed, particularly in an older house with more seasonal movement, and it needs somewhere dry to stand for several days.
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.
Where a floor is also somebody else’s ceiling we check the lease before specifying, because the acoustic requirement is frequently written into it and finding that out afterwards is nobody’s idea of a good week.
Part of our wider building work in Leicester.
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.
