Flatstone
Stone corridor with worn flagstones under a vaulted ceiling

Flatstone, Frome

Flagstone floors,
lifted and put back right

We take up flagstone floors that have sunk, cracked or been screeded over, clean the stone, and relay it on a base that lets the damp out again. Somerset houses, mostly from the yard at Frome.

Same stone back down. We do not sell you a new floor unless the old one is genuinely finished, and after twenty-six years we can count those on one hand.

01373 450166

What a flagstone job actually involves

Very little of it is stone work. Most of a week goes on what is underneath, which is why floors laid on a cement bed come back to us and floors laid on lime do not.

Lifting and numbering

Every flag is chalked and mapped before it moves. A floor put back in the wrong order looks wrong and nobody can say why.

Cleaning, not blasting

Cement, bitumen and forty years of polish come off with hand tools and poultice. Grit blasting opens the face of the stone and it never recovers.

A base that breathes

Limecrete, geotextile and sharp sand. No membrane, no screed: water that cannot come up through the floor goes up the walls instead.

Matching what is missing

Broken flags get made up from the yard. Blue lias, forest pennant, the odd bit of Bath stone: we match on thickness and colour, not on a catalogue code.

Taking a floor up without breaking it

Old flags are thin at the edges and nearly always bedded on nothing but soil. Half the breakages happen in the first twenty minutes, before anyone has worked out how the floor is sitting.

  • Chalked and mapped firstNumbers on the flag, numbers on a sketch. On a big kitchen that is an hour of work that saves two days of guessing.
  • Wedges, not a bar under the edgeA crowbar on the corner of a lias flag takes a lump out of it every time. Wedges lift it flat and slow.
  • Stacked on edge, off the groundFlags stored flat in a heap crack under their own weight. They go on edge on battens, in the order they came up.
Stonemason working at a stone ledge with hand tools

Why the floor sank in the first place

People assume the stone failed. The stone almost never fails. What fails is whatever somebody put under it in 1974, and the older the patch, the more cement is usually in it.

  • A screed over the topLevels the floor for a fortnight, then traps the moisture and pushes it into the skirtings and the plaster.
  • Sand washed out from beneathUsually next to an old drain run. The flag rocks, the corner takes the load and splits along the bedding plane.
  • Underfloor heating laid tightIt can be done and we have done it. Laid without a movement allowance it lifts the joints within two winters.
Mason bedding stone into lime mortar

Three things we will not do:

Not out of principle. We have been called back to fix all three often enough that taking the work on would be dishonest.

  • Seal a floor with acrylicIt looks wet for a year, goes cloudy in the traffic lines, and then has to be stripped before anything breathable will take.
  • Point flags in cementHarder than the stone around it. The joint survives and the edge of the flag crumbles away instead.
  • Pressure wash indoorsDrives litres of water into a floor with no way out, and takes the surface off soft lias while it is at it.
Close view of grey stone floor slabs and open joints

What it costs

Rates for 2026, per square metre of finished floor, VAT included. We quote the whole job after seeing it, but these are the numbers the quote is built from and they do not move much.

WorkRateWhat it covers
Lift, clean and relay£110 / m²The common job. Numbering, lifting, cleaning, new limecrete base, bedding and lime pointing.
Clean only£38 / m²Where the floor is sound and just looks dead under old polish, paint or cement splash.
Reclaimed blue lias, 50 mm£68 / m²From the yard, sold in mixed sizes as it comes off the pallet. Thicker stock is priced on the day.
Cutting and dressing£6 a cutSawn edge, or dressed by hand where it will be seen, such as a hearth or a threshold.
Survey within 25 miles of FromefreeFurther out it is £80, and that comes off the first invoice if you go ahead.

Minimum job £950. Below that the setting up costs more than the work is worth, and you are better off with a local builder who is already on site. We will say so on the phone rather than send someone out.

Before you ring

Five minutes with a tape measure saves a site visit, and usually gets you a price the same day.

  • rough size of the room in metres, corner to corner
  • two photographs: one of the whole floor, one close up of the worst flag
  • whether anything has been laid over the stone since
  • whether the room is on the ground floor and has a wall showing damp
  • your postcode, so we can say honestly how far out we are
Ring 01373 450166 Send the photographs
Stacked reclaimed stone beside a stone building

The stone outlasts the house it is in.

Most of what we relay was quarried before the railway came to Frome, and it will still be flat long after the rest of the kitchen has been replaced twice. The job is to give it a base worth sitting on.

Flatstone

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