Drainage Work in Kettering, priced in writing before anything starts.
Most of the drainage problems we are called to in Kettering are above ground rather than below it, and they trace back to how cheaply the rainwater system was originally specified.
On the artisan housing the gutters and downpipes were sized for the rainfall patterns and the roof areas of the day, and sized tightly. A single small downpipe frequently serves an entire roof slope. That was adequate for a long time. It is noticeably less adequate now, and the symptom is a gutter that copes for eleven months of the year and overflows in every genuinely heavy downpour, soaking the wall head at the same spot each time.
Because it only happens in heavy rain, people rarely see it happen. What they see is the damp patch inside, two or three years later, which then gets diagnosed as rising damp, penetrating damp or a wall problem, and treated at considerable expense. The cause is a hundred millimetre gutter doing the work of a hundred and twenty five.
So on this stock we look at the rainwater goods before we look at the wall. Upsizing a gutter, adding a second outlet or correcting a fall that has dropped over a century is cheap work with a large effect, and we would far rather sell you that than a chemical injection you did not need.
On the larger houses the roofs are bigger but the goods were specified properly, and the recurring issue is condition rather than capacity: cast iron that needs painting inside and out, and joints that need maintaining.
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 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 drainage work page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Kettering street to the next.
Where a gully at the base of a downpipe has silted up or been paved over, the water leaves the system at exactly the point where it does most harm to the wall. Clearing and rebuilding those properly is unglamorous work that solves more damp problems than anything else we do on this stock.
Below ground, where a run belongs to the water company rather than to you, building over or close to it needs consent granted before the concrete goes in, and every connection we make is tested before it is covered and recorded on a drawing you keep.
Scaffold or a tower is often needed to do gutter work properly on a three storey Kettering house, and on a terraced frontage that means a highway licence from the council. We would rather quote for the access and do the job properly than lean a ladder against a hundred year old gutter.
Part of our wider building work in Kettering.
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.
