Every floor leaves with a two-page written guarantee covering workmanship for ten years: lifting, gapping beyond seasonal tolerance, and movement at borders and thresholds, made good at our cost including materials. It names the job, the readings it was fitted against and the finish schedule, and it transfers with the house if you sell. The exclusions are the honest ones — leaks, floods, and floors asked to live under conditions the handover pack warned about in writing. Nothing in it depends on which mop you buy or whether you registered within thirty days; a guarantee with homework attached is an excuse waiting to be used.

Marcus and Josh hold NVQ Level 3 in floorcovering; Elena is FITA-trained on moisture measurement and subfloor assessment. The firm carries £5 million public liability, the fitters carry CSCS cards for commercial sites, and we are members of the Contract Flooring Association. Less usual: we have retained the survey readings for every job since 2009. If your floor was ours, we still have its numbers — which makes guarantee conversations short. The certificates and qualification cards travel in the van; ask, and they come out before the boots do.

Wood moves. A board floor in a British house closes its winter gaps in July and opens hairlines in January, and anyone promising otherwise is selling laminate or selling you short. What we promise instead is movement within tolerance — measured at fitting, written into the pack, and explained before you sign, so that February never arrives as a surprise. It is a smaller promise than “perfect forever”, and it is the one that can actually be kept. The tolerance figures themselves are printed on page one of the guarantee, in millimetres, beside the readings they were measured against.

Ring the office and Marcus visits with the original handover pack. Seasonal movement gets explained against the readings, honestly, even when the answer is “that is winter, it will close”. A genuine defect is re-booked within fifteen working days, fixed at our cost, and recorded on the same job sheet as the original fit. In twenty-four years the list of floors we have been back to is short; the list of arguments about it is shorter. The number on the guarantee is the workshop, not a claims handler — Marcus has answered it since 2002 and intends to keep answering it.