Shawlands, Glasgow Southside
Flooring fitters in Shawlands
In a Shawlands tenement the floor is somebody else's ceiling, and that single fact should shape every decision about it. Everything else, the board, the finish, the direction it runs, is easier to change your mind about than the build-up underneath.
Check the deeds before you lift the carpet
Many Southside tenement titles carry an obligation about floor coverings, often requiring carpet or an equivalent acoustic performance in the main rooms. It is worth five minutes with your deeds before committing to a hard floor, because retrofitting acoustic treatment after the fact means lifting everything you have just paid to lay.
Building up for sound
A proper acoustic build-up is more than a thin foam roll. Done well it combines a resilient layer with enough mass, and it is fitted so that nothing bridges rigidly to the joists at the perimeter. That last point is the one most often missed: one screw through the resilient layer into a joist undoes a good part of the benefit.
Levelling a floor that has settled
These buildings have moved over a hundred and something years, and it is common for a room to fall 15mm or more towards the bay window. You will not get that perfectly flat and you would not want to spend what it costs to try. We level enough for the floor to perform and to keep the perimeter gap consistent, and leave the rest as the character of the building.
Period skirting
Against a 200mm moulded tenement skirting, a strip of beading looks like an apology. Where the skirting can be lifted and reinstated over the new floor we will do that. Where it cannot, we scribe the boards to the profile instead, which takes longer and looks like it belongs.