EXTENSION SOLUTIONS: How to construct the ground floor

It’s a sobering thought that many of our forebears lived in dwellings with floors comprising little more than the earth beneath their feet — literal ‘ground’ floors. There are plenty of desirable period cottages on the market today, with six-figure price tags, that were originally constructed with floors of compacted earth covered with reeds or, for the better off, perhaps flagstones or pammett bricks. As original features go, this isn’t something that even the most die-hard conservationist would be eager to replicate, even where planning conditions stipulate that the extension should ‘match the existing’. In any case, all newly constructed ground floors need to meet minimum performance standards for structural integrity, thermal efficiency and protection from damp. In practice this usually means you have a choice of two types of construction for your