Wanted: Parquet fitter in London

[lozengeoflove]

Does anyone have any recommendations please? Looking for a competent and experienced parquet floor fitter who won’t cost the Earth!

I used these people about four years ago: www.ecoflooringuk.com because I liked the idea of reclaimed parquet. They are in Yorkshire but travel all over - I’m in London. They did a great job. I love my floor - even now when I look at it I feel really pleased with it! Always wanted parquet.

Same here, witch. We had parquet flooring as children, and honestly nothing compares.

Thanks so much for the link. Love their work! Would you mind letting me know how much they charged, please? So pleased to hear your floor looks fab

Just dug out the invoice and copied and pasted what it included below. Total was £10K + VAT. I didn’t get any other quotes as I wanted a specific kind of underfloor heating laid at the same time (invoiced separately) and the two companies already had a good working relationship which I figured was worth a lot in reducing potential hassle!

6 rooms (must have included each bit of hallway as a room as I had two bedrooms, hallways, kitchen and living room done). 55sqm plus 20% so 66 sqm in total. The extra is to allow for wastage and I suppose might depend on pattern and size of block - I had herringbone and not massive blocks as it’s a relatively smalll space.

Removal of carpet & laminate in Kitchen & Hallway
Skip hire
Removal and replacement of furniture in areas of work (this was loads of work and must have taken ages - they had to move all my stuff from room to room because I was having to whole flat done)

Supply and professional installation of reclaimed parquet flooring
Reclaimed Oak Herringbone –
Includes the actual wood blocks, all hand/machine cleaning of blocks and preparation including sanding /saw removal of most of the existing adhesive
Delivery – 2 pallets
Installation - This includes all expert fitting and staff on site.
All products used to install the blocks including top quality adhesives, secret nails and blades
Restoration - This includes all expert sanding, buffering and application of finish.
All restoration products including abrasives, sundries and a one compound finishing product.

This is great, thank you so much witch. We only want to get our front room done, but the space is quite big. Will need to get the measuring tape out and work out the m2.
Great to know that they do all the pesky jobs revolving around the furniture too. Think I’ll give them a call on Monday and take it from there. Thank you so much for posting

You’re welcome! They were helpful over phone and email too so definitely give them a call.

We've just had a beautiful parquet floor laid in our reception room by a company called Tom Flooring. They did a fantastic job and we're getting them back to do refurb the floorboards in our bedrooms. They're based in Herts but do loads of jobs in town. tomflooring.co.uk/

Sorry, meant to add that we got the tiles from here <a class="break-all" href="//www.www.flooringsuppliescentre.co.uk/browse/real_wood_flooring/1/parquet_flooring/index.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.www.flooringsuppliescentre.co.uk/browse/real_wood_flooring/1/parquet_flooring/index.html and they cost £1,200 for 32sq m and the cost of laying/sanding/varnishing it was £1,800. Plus our builder levelled the floor first to make sure it was perfectly level.

Thank you make. Just about to call them.
witch - eco flooring have given me a white. Their pics look amazing. Sadly they don’t offer the furniture removal and putting back or carpet recycling.

Will compare the two. Thank you both so much

Maybe they realised it was more hassle than it was worth! Still, you could probably get a Task Rabbit person to do that.

They may work out more expensive because of the reconditioning costs of reusing wood. I liked the idea of reusing, but not everyone will want to pay for that. Either way you are one step closer to a beautiful floor, whoever supplies it

Absolutely. I love the look of reclaimed wood. It’s just going to be about weighing up the costs. If it was only the floor we needed to do it wouldn’t be an issue. All of our downstairs needs renovating

Good call on Task Rabbit too

We used ecoflooring too. We're Yorkshire based. They were great over the phone and promised everything. However, they insisted on laying the subfloor themselves, rather than letting our builder do it. They ended up being late to start as their previous job overran so rushed the subfloor prep. The parquet was then laid on an uneven surface and we've had trouble with it ever since. They refused to come back to look at it (never answering the phone, refusing to reply to emails, being evasive about when they could come, denying that anything was their fault, etc.). Before we realised there were problems we had the kitchen installed and now we can't properly resolve things without taking the kitchen out and going back to the subfloor. We ended up getting someone else in to sort some of the problems, at a cost of an extra £4k, but it was impossible to really get sorted with the kitchen units in.

The installers did work really hard and were fine. Although they didn't use any facemasks and the work was absolutely filthy (whole house was covered in a film of dust - whereas the 2nd co we got out used a "clean air" system which was far, far tidier) I suspect that if the job went smoothly then ecoflooring would be fine, but if they had absolutely no interest in resolving any problems with us.

Thank you so much for posting, mouse. Sounds like an absolute nightmare for you guys. It’s so utterly frustrating when you’re paying a lot of money and have visions of what you’re going to get out of it, and then this doesn’t happen.

We are currently veering towards solid oak parquet from flooring supplies, which we might be able to have fitted by a carpenter friend. It’s more than half of the cost of eco flooring. Their floors are so beautiful, but I’m not sure we’ll want to splash out as much as they are quoting.