Footings & Excavation in Corby, priced in writing before anything starts.
Groundworks in Corby are shaped by the fact that the ground under most of the town was worked before the houses went on it.
Estate development at this scale means made up levels: ground cut and filled when the site was laid out, so that what is under a garden is frequently not the ground that was there naturally. Made up ground can be perfectly adequate to found on and it can be entirely unsuitable, and the only way to know which you have is to dig and look. We put in a trial hole before the design is fixed rather than pricing off an assumption.
Where a plot sits on or near a former industrial site, a site history check is the sensible first step. We are not going to tell you your garden is contaminated, because nobody can say that from the pavement, and we are not going to pretend the question does not exist either.
Trees are the third factor and they catch people out on this stock. The trees planted when these estates were laid out in the 1950s and 1960s are now seventy years old and very much large enough to influence a foundation on shrinkable ground. Their age is easy to underestimate because the houses look modern.
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 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 Corby street to the next.
Access on a Corby plot is usually good enough for a machine to reach the working area, which keeps groundworks costs sensible and is one of the real advantages of building here rather than in an older town.
Muck away needs a grab lorry with somewhere legal to stand, and on wide estate roads that is normally straightforward rather than a highways negotiation.
Nothing gets dug until we know what is already down there. On an estate laid out in one go the service runs frequently cut across plots rather than following them, so we scan before breaking ground.
Existing garage and shed bases on these plots are often sound mass concrete in exactly the right place, and where that is the case we will tell you it is a resource rather than an obstruction. Building off something already there and already proven is cheaper and quicker than breaking it out to pour a new one.
Part of our wider building work in Corby.
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.
