Drainage Work in Leamington Spa, priced in writing before anything starts.
Drainage under a Leamington terrace is usually older than anybody living above it and rarely laid out the way you would guess.
The spa era streets were drained as streets rather than as individual houses. A single run frequently serves several properties, passing under gardens and through walls that were built around it, and the manhole in your garden may be the only access point for a run serving four other households. That changes what can be built over, what can be diverted and who has to agree to it, and it is worth knowing before a design is settled rather than after.
Lightwell gullies are the second Leamington specific. They take water from a paved area below external ground level, which means when one blocks there is nowhere for the water to go but into the building. They are frequently the real cause of damp that gets blamed on the walls.
Where a run belongs to the water company rather than to you, and since 2011 a great many do, building over or near it needs consent granted before the concrete goes in.
On a system of this age we put a camera down before we design over anything. An hour with a survey turns a set of assumptions into a drawing. 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 Warwick District 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 Leamington Spa street to the next.
Where a shared run crosses a neighbour’s ground or serves several houses, the permissions and the notice are agreed before the spade goes in. In a building divided into flats that can mean several parties, and it takes longer to arrange than the work itself takes to carry out.
Every connection is tested before it is covered and recorded on a drawing you keep, which on a Victorian shared system is genuinely useful to the next person who has to open the ground.
Rainwater from a parapet roof leaves the building through a hopper head and a downpipe, usually in cast iron, and those hoppers are the least inspected part of the whole building. They fill with debris, they overflow behind the parapet, and the first symptom is damp at high level inside. Clearing and repainting them is unglamorous and it prevents a far more expensive repair, so we look at them whenever we are up there for anything else.
Part of our wider building work in Leamington Spa.
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.
