Latex in Buckingham flats and refitted kitchens
Flats make up 12% of Buckingham's homes, and a flat refit is a natural place for latex. An upper floor in a block may be concrete or timber, and either way a new owner taking out old carpet or vinyl usually finds a surface that needs smoothing rather than rebuilding. A thin layer keeps the floor height almost unchanged, which matters where front doors, thresholds and kitchen plinths are already fixed.
Houses follow the same logic. Lift a kitchen floor in an older house and you may find a run of quarry tiles, a ceramic floor laid over at some point, or concrete with ridges of old glue. If the tiles are all firmly bonded, they can stay: loose ones are taken up and filled, the glaze is cleaned, and a primer made for tiles goes down before the latex. Old adhesive is judged the same way. A thin, hard, well stuck film can often be primed and covered, while thick or soft residue comes off first, usually by grinding the concrete clean.
Timber is where people most often go wrong. Latex should never be spread straight onto floorboards, because they flex and their joints open and close through the year. The boards are fixed, flooring grade plywood is screwed over them, and the latex goes on the ply.
Only 4% of the town's homes date from between the wars. The listed and period buildings of the centre are a separate case, covered below.
When latex is wrong for Buckingham's Georgian centre
Georgian rebuilding after the 1725 fire gave Buckingham's centre its listed and period buildings, and their floors call for repairs matched to their original construction. A cement based latex compound is meant to bond permanently to whatever it covers, so it should not be spread over an original stone, tile or timber floor without the owner's agreement and any consent the building needs. In that setting, a careful repair to the existing floor is often more fitting.
Elsewhere, latex still has firm limits. It does not cure damp, and on a wet ground floor the compound will lose its bond, so we test before laying. It will not stiffen a springy floor. Nor is it meant to fill a floor that is badly out of level: once the correction runs past a few millimetres, a deeper levelling compound or a new screed is needed. Our floor levelling page for Buckingham sets out those choices and the flatness classes behind them.
Where a newer house has a calcium sulphate screed, its laitance must be sanded off and the surface primed before latex. Whether the home is in Castle Fields, Stratford Fields or Mount Pleasant, the finishes that call for latex are the same: sheet vinyl, LVT, lino, rubber, safety flooring and carpet. For the same service in a nearby town, see latex screed in Bletchley.
How we price latex screed in Buckingham
A fixed written price within 24 hours, once we know the area and the base. See our floor screeding cost guide.
Who lays your latex screed in Buckingham
K & B Screeding’s own team, led by director Donatas Bardisevicius. Founded 2019, company 12298780.
See what customers say in our Google reviews and on our testimonials page.
Latex Screed from Slough to Buckingham
As the crow flies, our yard in Slough is about 35.6 miles from Buckingham, which lies to the north-north-west. Postcodes here include MK18, and Brackley (7.1 miles), Towcester (9 miles), Bicester (10.1 miles) and Milton Keynes (10.3 miles) are close by.
More on latex screed, part of our screeding services.