Drainage Work in Coventry, priced in writing before anything starts.
Drainage is where Coventry extensions go wrong quietly, and where the cost of getting it wrong appears years later during a sale.
The first question on any rear extension is whether a public sewer runs under the footprint. Since 2011 a great many drains householders assumed were their own have belonged to the water company, and Severn Trent is the undertaker here. Building over or close to one needs a build over agreement, applied for and granted before the concrete goes in. It is a routine application and a serious problem to be caught without.
Coventry’s Victorian terraces add a complication the estates do not have: shared drain runs. A single run frequently serves several houses in the terrace, which means work on it affects neighbours and needs handling properly rather than quietly. We establish what serves what before we dig.
Surface water is the other half. A soakaway only works if the ground will take the water, and that is a site by site answer rather than an assumption. A percolation test costs very little next to a soakaway that fills in October and stays full until March.
We also get called to existing faults: a gully that floods in heavy rain, a manhole backing up, a downpipe discharging to nothing much. Those are usually cheaper to fix properly than to keep living around. Our drainage work page covers surveys, repairs and new connections.
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 Coventry 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 drainage work page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Coventry street to the next.
Drainage is the trade where the constraint is depth rather than width. A connection into an existing manhole on a terraced plot can mean a deep, narrow excavation next to a boundary wall built with very little foundation, and that needs shoring and care rather than speed. Where a run crosses a neighbour’s ground or a shared entry, the permissions are sorted before the spade goes in.
There is a choice people are rarely offered. Where a public sewer crosses the footprint, the alternative to a build over agreement is diverting the run clear of the extension altogether. Diverting costs more on the day and it removes the constraint permanently, which matters if you might extend again or sell to somebody who reads the searches carefully. We will price both and let you decide rather than assuming the cheaper option is the one you want.
Part of our wider building work in Coventry.
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.
