Footings & Excavation in Solihull, priced in writing before anything starts.
Groundworks in Solihull are decided by trees more comprehensively than anywhere else we work, and it runs in both directions.
The familiar risk first. On shrinkable clay, a foundation within influencing distance of a mature tree has to go deeper than the standard depth, sometimes very much deeper, and occasionally the right answer is a different foundation type altogether. The distance that matters depends on the species and the mature height, and it frequently reaches further than owners believe.
The less familiar risk runs the other way. Removing a large tree from shrinkable clay allows the ground to swell back over several years, lifting foundations rather than dropping them. Heave is slower to appear and considerably harder to remedy than subsidence, and in a borough where trees are regularly removed under consent, it is a genuine consideration rather than a textbook one. If a tree has come out recently near your proposed extension, that belongs in the foundation design.
Then there is the tree itself. Excavating through a root protection area can kill a protected tree slowly, which is both a legal and an environmental problem, so within the root zone we hand dig rather than machine.
We establish all of this with a trial hole before the design is fixed. Everything is inspected before it is covered. Our footings and excavation page explains our approach.
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 Solihull Metropolitan Borough 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 Solihull street to the next.
Access on a Solihull plot is generally good enough for a machine to reach the working area, which keeps costs sensible, provided the route avoids protected roots. Where it cannot, ground protection boards go down.
Muck away needs a grab lorry with somewhere legal to stand, which on these roads is usually straightforward rather than a highways negotiation.
Nothing gets dug until we know what is already down there. We scan for services before breaking ground, which costs an hour and avoids an afternoon nobody wants.
Where a footing comes close to a protected tree, the council may want an arboricultural method statement setting out how the work will be carried out without damaging it. That is a document produced by an arboriculturist rather than by us, it takes time to obtain, and it belongs in the programme from the start rather than arriving as a condition.
Part of our wider building work in Solihull.
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.
