For main contractors
Tier 1 contractors work with Trent because the floor goes in when we said it would, to the grade the specification demands, with the paperwork done properly.
The work
When you put a flooring or screed project out to tender, you are buying certainty as much as concrete. A floor that slips, fails its grade or causes a clash costs you far more than the project is worth.
Trent is set up to remove that risk, with self-delivery, honest programming and method built around the realities of your site. Project values run from around £15,000 to £2m and beyond, and we work nationwide from Burton upon Trent, Leeds, Southampton and Aldermaston.
Proof, not promises.
Three people usually look at our tender, and each of you is asking a different question. Here are the answers.
You want to know whether the price is complete and whether it is comparable with the other two on your desk.
Our price includes the placing. We run our own line pumps and our own track-mounted placing booms, so pumping is inside the number rather than a provisional sum that appears later. It includes the flatness or surface regularity survey against the specified grade. It includes RAMS and the handover documentation.
What it does not include is a hopeful programme. If the durations in the tender documents do not work, we will tell you at tender and price the duration that does. That makes our number look different from a subcontractor who has priced the programme you asked for and will claim the difference later.
You want to know what is in and what is out, and where the variations will come from.
The two places flooring projects generate variations are the base and the specification. A sub-base or a deck outside tolerance costs concrete volume or a regulating operation, and a flatness grade that turns out to be wrong for the racking or the floor covering costs a remedial. We flag both at tender, in writing, rather than discovering them.
We will also tell you when the specification is tighter than the use requires. An over-specified flatness grade is money you are spending for no operational benefit, and we would rather say so than quietly price it.
You want to know whether we will hold your programme and whether we will be a problem on site.
We self-deliver, so there is no second-tier subcontractor to chase and no gap between the crew who places the concrete and the crew who finishes it. We programme backwards from the finishing window, because on a concrete floor the finish is the constraint. We report honestly, including when it is bad news. If we cannot hit something, you hear it early, not late.
Our own operatives, our own plant, our own placing booms, start to finish.
On a power floated floor the finish is decided in a two hour window by the people standing on the slab, judging the concrete. A finishing gang who have never worked with the placing gang will guess at that. Ours will not. That is the whole argument for self-delivery, and it is the reason the tolerance holds rather than nearly holds.
The same applies to placing. When the pump is somebody else's, the pour waits on somebody else's day. When it is ours, the placing method is designed into the works from the start.
That combination is why we end up on the projects other subcontractors decline. We take on the floors others won't. More on the company and the plant at about Trent.
Most flooring subcontractors are set up for an empty building. We are set up for the other kind.
Flatness is the thing most likely to be argued about at handover, so we settle it with evidence.
In-situ concrete floors are surveyed against the TR34 free movement classification specified, FM1 to FM4, measured on Property E for levelness and Property F for flatness, assessed on the 95th percentile. Screeds are surveyed against the BS 8204 surface regularity class specified, SR1, SR2 or SR3.
You get the survey results, the cube results, the pour records and the joint layout as constructed. Not an assurance that it went well.
Constructionline Gold registered. Avetta and SSIP accredited. Member of the Nuclear Industry Association.
We deliver for Tier 1 contractors and major clients including VINCI, McLaren, Costain, Kier, Interclass, Tomlinson, SMD, Actavo, Tarmac and Veolia.
Concrete flooring covers power floated floors, large pour and laser screed slabs, and external hardstandings. Screeds covers flowing and liquid screed, self-compacting systems and screeds on precast plank decks. Concrete pumping runs alongside both with our own plant.
FAQs
Send us the drawings and the specification, and we'll tell you straight whether we can deliver it, and how.
Discuss your project