Original parquet is usually worth saving, and half our restoration jobs start with a photo of one lifted corner — so ring before you rip anything out. We lift loose blocks, clean off the old bitumen, splice in reclaimed stock matched by species and cut, then sand flat with full dust extraction and finish in hard-wax oil or lacquer. The 1908 pine hallway on Cold Bath Road in our gallery came back from under two layers of carpet; the owner still cannot find the repair. The guidance is honest, too: past about sixty per cent replacement a new floor is cheaper, and we say so at the survey rather than after the invoice.

The invisible half of the price. Latex levelling to SR1 flatness, damp-proof membranes where the carbide test demands one, plywood overlays on tired boards, and screed drying times we will not argue with. When another quote says your floor “just needs a skim”, this is the section to compare it against — ours itemises every square metre of preparation, because preparation is where cheap floors fail. For scale: a 20 square metre lounge usually needs a day of preparation, and a suspended timber floor with spring in it wants ply and screws, not another layer of latex.

Shops, clinics and offices, fitted around opening hours rather than through them. The dental practice on our books took a full LVT refit across one weekend: readings Friday evening, surgery open Monday at eight, handover pack on the practice manager’s desk. Out-of-hours work is quoted the same way as everything else — fixed, in writing, with the programme attached. We carry £5 million public liability, CSCS cards and RAMS for inductions, and we sequence around your trading hours rather than asking you to close.