Renovations & Refurbishments in Wellingborough, priced in writing before anything starts.
Renovation in Wellingborough runs into damp more often than in the towns on higher ground, and it is worth being precise about why, because the wrong diagnosis here is expensive.
In a valley town with water closer to the surface, ground moisture is a genuine and ordinary condition of many older buildings rather than a fault in them. Those buildings were constructed to cope with it, using permeable materials that let moisture move through and evaporate. What causes the visible damage is usually a later intervention that stopped them doing that: cement render on a stone or soft brick wall, an impermeable paint, a raised path or patio outside that has taken the external ground above the internal floor.
Before anybody injects a chemical damp proof course we would rather look at the external ground level, the rainwater goods and what the wall has been coated with, because on this ground those three things explain the majority of what we are called to.
Where stonework needs repair there is a sourcing problem to be honest about. The small local quarries that supplied Wellingborough’s building stone disappeared as the town expanded through the twentieth century, so matching genuinely old local stone is a salvage exercise rather than an order. We will tell you what is realistically achievable rather than promising a match we cannot deliver.
Structural alterations are inspected under the Building Regulations and we arrange and meet those inspections through to sign off. More on our renovation and refurbishment page.
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 renovations & refurbishments page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Wellingborough street to the next.
Lime work is weather dependent in a way cement is not. It cannot be done in frost and it needs protecting while it cures, so on this kind of building the programme follows the season rather than the diary.
A full strip out generates more waste than any other job, and on a modern plot the skip stands on your own drive, which removes both the licence and the fee.
Where a property is in the town centre conservation area, which is on the Heritage at Risk register, we photograph and record before anything is disturbed. Applications there get more scrutiny rather than less.
Part of our wider building work in Wellingborough.
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.
