Footings & Excavation in Burbage, priced in writing before anything starts.
Groundworks in the Burbage core come with a constraint that decides the price before anything else does: a machine usually cannot get to the work.
With no side access, no driveway and a front door onto the footpath, there is frequently no route for even a small excavator to reach a rear garden. That makes it a hand dig, and a hand dig is several times the labour of the same hole done by machine. It is not a reason to avoid the work and it is absolutely a reason to have the price reflect it from the start rather than as a variation in week two.
The second factor is what you are digging next to. Older village cottages sit on very little foundation, built in lime mortar, and they do not tolerate a trench opened alongside them in one go. Excavation next to them is sequenced and sometimes supported, and on a continuous terrace the wall is usually shared, which is party wall territory.
Third is the ordinary one: on shrinkable clay a foundation near a mature tree goes deeper than standard, and in a conservation area that tree is protected as well. A trial hole answers this before an open trench does.
Everything is inspected before it is covered. Our footings and excavation page explains how we approach foundations and site preparation.
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 Hinckley & Bosworth Borough 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 Burbage street to the next.
Muck away from a hand dig still has to leave the site, and with no drive it leaves through the house in barrows and bags to a grab lorry or skip standing on the carriageway under a county licence. That sequence is the real programme driver on a core groundworks job and we set it out at quotation stage.
Nothing gets dug until we know what is already down there. Services in an old village run in positions no record reflects, so we scan before breaking ground.
Where a new foundation goes deeper than the one next door, and against an old shallow village wall it usually will, the sequence matters more than the speed. We dig in short lengths, support as we go and never open the full run at once. If the answer turns out to be underpinning rather than a deeper trench, we will say so plainly rather than pressing on.
Part of our wider building work in Burbage.
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.
