Have these skirtings boards been fitted incorrectly?

[Missnearlyvintage]

We have just had new skirting boards fitted throughout our ground floor, and I’m now panicking that they’ve all been fitted wrong and it will affect our available flooring choices... We’ve paid the builders already so I don’t really know how to proceed?

Our old skirting boards basically went down to our concrete floor give or take a couple of mm, but our new skirting boards have been fitted much higher. Some gaps between the floor and the underside of the skirting are more than 15mm with the slight undulations in our concrete floor.

I did mention this to the carpenter when he was fitting the skirting in the first room where he fitted them highest and he didn’t seem to think it was abnormal. I noticed that you could see the underside of the skirting, even when there was an old carpet with underlay in the room...

In the two other rooms he fitted the skirting slightly lower (one room about 4m - 8m and one room 10 -12mm.

I hadn’t fully realised the issue until today when I pulled up the old carpets in the rooms and measured around everywhere (we’d kept it down to help keep things liveable while we’re decorating).

I just feel sick to be honest as I know I should’ve probably been more pushy when voicing my concerns during the work, or investigated it further before now and before paying. Was I supposed to specify exactly how high it should be fitted off of the floor? I presumed it would just be fitted as it had been previously?

Any advice would be very gratefully received, thank you!

What flooring are you planning to put down?

In my experience leaving a gap like you describe is standard. When we did our loft, the skirting boards were screwed in first and then we had to fit the floors to the gap. We did that by choosing a certain combination of underlay, insulation and wood boards of a specific thickness.

If you think the gap is too big, I'm sure by adding an (additional) underlay the problem can be resolved quite easily.

No 15mm is not ok
Skirtings should be fitted after the flooring. That’s what they are for, to hide any unevenness where the flooring touches the wall. So in your concrete room they should touch the concrete as near as possible and then caulk any (tiny) gaps

Carpet it’s the other way round, skirting first. hopefully your new carpets will be deeper than your old ones (old carpets have been flattened) and you can choose underlay to suit.

Sorry just re read your OP, is the concrete your final floor finish or not? My answer assumes it is?

Littlebirdblues - thanks for your reply. The flooring will probably be LVT in two rooms and carpet in the other. LVT is obviously much lower profile than carpet and even with floor screed under it the flooring fitter has said the gap will be very noticeable which is really disappointing.

I spoke to our flooring fitter this morning and he advised that we should be getting the builders back to rectify this, as he said the skirting boards should’ve been scribed to the floor to create a minimal and uniform gap between the skirting boards and the floor - as far as he was concerned that was standard good practise? At present the skirtings haven’t been scribed at all which the floor fitter said was part of this issue in some places.

The builders are coming to look tomorrow so fingers crossed they are willing to rectify it.

Thanks again - it’s so tricky when I’ve got no knowledge of anything like this, I think I need to get clued up!

@minipie no the concrete isn’t the finished floor, but the LVT that is going to be the finished floor probably in two of the rooms won’t make up the gap unfortunately...