Flooring Fitters in Borrowash and Ockbrook

Borrowash and Ockbrook sit side by side between Derby and Long Eaton, and they are not the same place at all. Ockbrook is the older of the two, with a Georgian core and the Moravian Settlement founded in the middle of the eighteenth century — a conserved group of buildings that gives the village a character nothing else in Erewash has. Borrowash grew up alongside it and is largely nineteenth and twentieth century, with a good deal of postwar and modern building filling in.

Between them that gives a housing mix spanning nearly three hundred years, which in flooring terms means one thing above all: you often do not know what is under the carpet until you lift it.

Carpet has been the default floor covering in this country since the 1960s, and an enormous number of original floors went under it rather than out of the house. In Ockbrook and the older parts of Borrowash we regularly lift a carpet and find something that has been sitting there untouched for sixty years.

The usual candidates are worth knowing. Quarry tiles — plain red or brown, unglazed, laid straight onto the ground in kitchens and halls. Geometric or encaustic tiles, patterned in two or more colours, typically in a Victorian hallway and genuinely valuable if they are intact. Pine floorboards, which may be structural or may be a decorative surface depending on the age of the house. Parquet or wood block, usually interwar, laid in herringbone or basket weave and bedded in bitumen. And in anything postwar, plain concrete or chipboard, which nobody needs to agonise over.

If you find one of the first four, stop before you do anything. An original patterned hall floor or a sound parquet is often worth more than whatever was going to be laid over it, and a floor that has survived this long can usually be saved.

Once you know what you have there are three honest options, and we will tell you which we think applies rather than which suits us.

Keep and restore. Original tile and parquet can be cleaned, repaired and brought back, but that is specialist restoration work — not what a flooring contractor does. We are not a restoration firm and we will say so. What we can do is tell you that what you have is worth the phone call to someone who is.

Keep and cover. Often the sensible middle path, particularly where the floor is sound but you want something warmer, quieter or easier to live with. The new floor goes over the top and the original stays intact beneath it, waiting for whoever owns the house in thirty years. Moisture still has to be checked first, since floors of this vintage predate damp-proof membranes by some decades.

Lift it. Sometimes the right answer. A broken, patched, half-missing quarry tile floor is not a heritage asset and levelling over a bad one is often a false economy. If the property is listed, this is the point to ring the conservation officer at your council first — listing covers interiors, and an original floor can be caught by it.

Whichever route, the preparation is the same job: test for moisture, prime, level, then lay.

Most of Borrowash is not a Victorian hallway, and the everyday work here is much like anywhere else. Postwar and modern semis, bungalows and detached houses, solid downstairs and timber upstairs, with LVT and laminate through the busy rooms and carpet where people want it soft.

Single-storey living brings its own requests. Where a bathroom is being reworked for easier access, the floor wants to be slip-resistant vinyl, welded at the seams and coved up the wall so the room can be washed down properly and there is no joint at floor level.

Access is straightforward in most of the village — driveways, somewhere to park, no long carry — which keeps fitting days short. The older lanes around the Ockbrook settlement are the exception and we will ask about parking when we quote rather than discover it on the day.

Two villages of this age carry a lot of community buildings, and they are a category of their own. Village halls, church halls, scout and guide huts, committee rooms and community centres, nearly all of them run by volunteers with a fixed budget and a grant application behind it.

The brief is different from a shop. It has to take hard use from a hundred different activities, survive being mopped by whoever is on the rota, and last fifteen years rather than five. In practice that usually means a good commercial sheet vinyl or heavy-contract carpet tile — tiles have the advantage that a damaged one is replaced for the cost of a tile rather than a room.

Two honest caveats. If the hall is used for dancing, martial arts or exercise classes and somebody has mentioned a sprung floor, that is a specialist sports flooring install and not something we take on — we will tell you that rather than quote for the wrong thing. And floor coverings on an escape route in a public building have a required fire classification, set out under Approved Document B, so send us the specification if one has been written and we will quote to it.

We are happy to quote in a form that works for a grant application, with the product specification and a clear breakdown, because that is usually what the committee actually needs.