Flooring in Daventry, priced in writing before anything starts.
Flooring is the part of a job people think least about beforehand and notice most afterwards, and in Daventry the answer depends on which half of the town you are in.
The estate housing from the 1960s onward has solid ground floors, and there the questions are flatness and moisture rather than ventilation. Most of these floors need levelling before a hard covering goes down. A floor out by a few millimetres over a couple of metres looks perfectly fine to the eye and shows badly in large format tile or engineered board, and levelling it properly is the difference between a floor that looks right and one that never quite does.
In the older core there are suspended timber ground floors over ventilated voids. The air bricks feeding those voids are doing a job, and the number that have been rendered over, planted in front of or built up against by a later extension is remarkable. Block the ventilation and the void stops breathing and the joist ends begin to go. We check before laying anything, because a beautiful floor over a rotting one is a waste of your money.
Timber needs to acclimatise in the house before it is fixed, particularly in an older building with more seasonal movement. We allow for that in the programme rather than fitting boards out of the van on the day they arrive. 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 West 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 flooring page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Daventry street to the next.
Flooring is the last trade in and the easiest to ruin, so we programme it late and protect it once it is down. In an occupied house we lay in sections so there is always a dry route from the front door to the stairs rather than a ground floor closed off for a week, and acclimatisation needs somewhere dry to stand for several days, which is worth planning rather than assuming.
If underfloor heating is wanted, decide it before the floor build up is fixed. On the solid floors of the estate housing the choice is excavating to get insulation underneath, which is a real excavation, or a low profile system laid over the top, which costs headroom at every doorway. Both are perfectly good answers. They are very different jobs and very different money, and the decision is far cheaper made at the drawing stage than after the screed is down.
Part of our wider building work in Daventry.
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.
