Flooring in Banbury, priced in writing before anything starts.
Floors in older Banbury properties raise a problem that modern flooring practice is not designed for: many of them have no damp proof membrane and were never meant to have one.
A traditional solid floor in a stone building, flagstone or brick laid straight onto the ground, works the same way the walls do. Ground moisture rises through it and evaporates from the surface, and the building copes because the moisture has an escape route. Laying an impermeable modern floor over the top does not stop the water, it redirects it, and it usually comes out at the base of the walls instead. A great many damp problems in these buildings date precisely from the year somebody laid a new floor.
Where an original stone or brick floor survives it is usually worth keeping and worth uncovering. It needs cleaning and repointing in lime rather than sealing, and it will always feel cooler underfoot than a modern floor, which is a fair trade for a floor that has already lasted two centuries.
Where a modern floor is genuinely needed, it has to be designed with the walls in mind rather than in isolation, and we will explain the options honestly rather than laying the easy build up and leaving you the consequences.
On the estate housing the floors are ordinary solid slabs where flatness and moisture are the questions. Our flooring page covers the coverings and the preparation 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 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 flooring page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Banbury street to the next.
On any solid floor we test for moisture before laying rather than trusting the look of it, because a slab can appear dry and still be wet enough to lift an adhesive.
Flooring is the last trade in and the easiest to ruin, so we programme it late and protect it once down. In an occupied cottage we lay in sections, keeping a dry route from the door to the stairs throughout.
Timber acclimatises in the building before it is fixed, particularly in a solid walled property with more seasonal movement, and it needs somewhere dry to stand for several days.
If a floor has to come up in an older property we look at what is underneath before deciding what goes back, because the floor build up and the wall detail have to be considered as one thing rather than as two separate decisions.
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.
