Footings & Excavation in Wellingborough, priced in writing before anything starts.
Groundworks in Wellingborough are where the valley position stops being a description and becomes a cost.
On lower lying plots an excavation can take water, and a trench with water in it is a different job from a dry one. It may need pumping. It may need supporting sooner and more thoroughly. The concrete may need to go in promptly rather than when it suits the programme, and there are weeks in the winter when the honest answer is that the ground is not fit to open. None of that is unusual in a river valley and all of it belongs in a quotation rather than in a variation.
Bearing is the other question. Ground near a river includes alluvial deposits that can be soft and variable over short distances, and a foundation designed off an assumption rather than off a hole can be adequate at one end of a trench and not the other. We dig to find bearing rather than to reach a figure on a drawing, and the building inspector will want to see the same.
That is why the trial hole here is the single most useful hour on a project. It answers the water question and the bearing question together, and it turns the two largest variables in a groundworks price into known quantities.
Everything is inspected before it is covered. We book the inspections and we do not pour over an unseen trench. 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 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 footings & excavation page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Wellingborough street to the next.
Where the trial hole shows water we will tell you what that means for the price and the programme before you commit, rather than starting and explaining afterwards.
Muck away needs a grab lorry with somewhere legal to stand, and wet spoil is heavier and messier to handle than dry, which we allow for rather than absorbing.
Nothing gets dug until we know what is already down there. We scan for services before breaking ground, which costs an hour and avoids an afternoon nobody wants.
Where an excavation has to be dewatered, the water has to go somewhere legitimate rather than onto a neighbour or into a foul drain. We agree that before we start pumping, because on lower lying ground a badly directed discharge simply moves the problem next door.
Part of our wider building work in Wellingborough.
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.
