Flooring Fitters in Melbourne

Melbourne is a small Georgian and Victorian town in South Derbyshire with a Norman church, a hall and gardens, a pool, and a food and drink trade a good deal larger than a place of its size has any right to. It also has a conservation area covering most of the centre and a great many buildings that predate the twentieth century entirely.

We cover Melbourne itself along with Kings Newton, Wilson, Ticknall, Stanton by Bridge and Weston on Trent. The work divides fairly neatly between old houses with cellars under them and a newer fringe where none of that applies.

A great many of the older houses here have a cellar, and that changes what your ground floor actually is. Instead of a solid slab sitting on the ground, you have a suspended timber floor — joists spanning across a void, with boards on top and open air underneath.

That void is supposed to be ventilated. Air moves through it via airbricks in the outside wall, carries moisture away and keeps the timber dry. When the system works, a suspended floor lasts indefinitely. When it stops working, the timber does not.

The most common reason it stops working is the simplest: the airbricks get blocked. A raised patio, a new drive, a flowerbed built up against the wall, insulation stuffed into a void, or simply sixty years of soil creeping up the brickwork. Once the air stops moving, moisture that used to leave sits in the void instead, and joist ends — which are bedded into a damp outside wall to begin with — start to go.

The signs are worth knowing before you spend money on a covering. A springy or dipping patch of floor, particularly near an outside wall or a chimney breast. A musty smell in a room that is otherwise fine. Skirting that has started to lift or go soft at the bottom. Any of those is a reason to look underneath before laying anything over the top.

Where the joists have gone too far, that is a joist and boarding repair rather than a flooring job, and it has to happen first. We would rather tell you that than lay a beautiful floor onto something that is failing beneath it.

Even a perfectly sound suspended floor over a cellar is cold, because there is unheated air directly underneath it. That is a genuine comfort problem in a Melbourne sitting room in February and it is worth knowing what can and cannot be done about it.

What does not work is choosing a warmer-feeling covering and hoping. Carpet with a good underlay takes the edge off; tile and LVT will not. What does work is insulating between the joists, which means either lifting the floorboards or working from the cellar below if there is head height for it. Done properly it makes a very substantial difference.

The one thing that must not happen is insulating in a way that blocks the ventilation of the void. Filling the space solidly, or covering the airbricks, trades a cold room for rotten joists. Insulation goes between the joists with the air path preserved beneath or around it.

This is building work rather than flooring work and we will say so. But it is exactly the sort of thing that is easy while the floor is up and expensive once it is down, so it belongs in the conversation at the start.

Most of central Melbourne sits in a conservation area and a fair number of buildings are listed. Those are two different things and it is worth not confusing them.

Conservation area status is mainly about external appearance and demolition. Changing a floor covering inside a house does not normally engage it.

Listing does cover interiors. Lifting an original floor in a listed building — flagstones, early quarry tile, original boards — can require consent. We fit floors and we do not advise on heritage consent; what we will do is flag it when something under the carpet looks like it belongs to the house, so you can take it up with the conservation officer at South Derbyshire District Council before anything is disturbed.

For a town this size Melbourne has an unusual concentration of food businesses — restaurants, a bakery, delis, cafes and pubs — and that produces the bulk of the commercial work here.

A commercial kitchen floor has requirements rather than preferences. It wants welded safety vinyl with every seam hot-welded and the vinyl coved up the wall and capped, so the whole floor is a single continuous surface with no joint at floor level for anything to collect in. It has to stay slip-resistant with grease and water on it, not just when dry, which is what a rated safety vinyl is built for and what a domestic sheet vinyl is not.

Front of house is a different brief again — it has to look right, take chair movement and trolley traffic, and be cleanable at the end of a service. Usually that is a heavy-contract vinyl or carpet tile, sometimes tile.

Most of these premises are in old buildings, which means the same uneven floors, moisture questions and listed status apply as in a house. We raise those at quote stage rather than on the day, because discovering them mid-refit when you are due to reopen on Friday helps nobody.

Kitchens and dining rooms are fitted around a closure. Tell us the quiet day or the shutdown week and we will programme to it.