All the Stuff in the World...

[katexxxxxx]

With ravenrigan trying to move down here out of London, and looking for houses, I spent an idle sleepless night (thank you fibro and IBS combined!) looking at 4 bedroom houses in this area.  I could move.  But to get the size of house I want, I'd end up in one of those 1970's housing estates, or just round the corner from where we moved out of.  With a small garden and neighbours looking in the upstairs windows.

Sorry, GMNT, however cramped you are at the moment, that is never happening.  So I started looking at the price of loft conversions.  I found this useful site that gave a breakdown.  Looking at the top of their ranges, I priced it up.  We could do it when Mum's flat sells...  I posted this elsewhere to see what people thought.  Some useful comments came back.

For those of you who know my house, it's very obvious why we would do this rather than move.  But here's the breakdown...

The major problems with this house are:

• The third bedroom, currently the GMNT's, is 8' by 5'11" plus a bit for the door.
• There is nowhere to shoe-horn in a downstairs cloakroom
• We cannot build a garage: there is plenty of space in the front garden, but because of where we are, we aren't allowed to do so.
• The garden is huge: the whole plot, from front road to back fence is 290'.  It's about 25' wide at the road end, and narrows down to about 15' at the far end...
• Because we are mid terrace,and because of the house layout, everything like the lawn mower, the hedge trimmer, and car oil-changing kit has to go through the house...  Through the living room!
• We need new windows, and a severe case of redecorating.
• Cesspool drainage

The advantages are:

• Location: this is a very desirable village with an excellent and over-subscribed primary school within walking distance.  The secondary schools in town have excellent reputations: a boy's grammar, a girl's grammar, a good comp, and two mixed high schools: good points when we finally have to sell
• We have excellent neighbours
• House layout is convenient, with little wasted space
• We have a fantastic garden room/conservatory, with brick built walls
• The gas central heating boiler is almost new
• The bus stops almost outside our front door!

Whet we envisage doing is:

• Dormering out the maximum permitted along the whole length of the rear of the house
• Inserting a stair to the loft, to a small landing.
• Making a shower room over the existing bathroom
• Making a double bedroom for the GMNT over bedrooms 1 & 3
• Making a box room over bedroom 2 (currently my sewing room and the spare bedroom)
• Converting bedroom 3 into a study for Himself
• Converting the wasted space in the current stairwell into a large storage cupboard, access from bedroom 1
• Putting in new replacement UPVC windows in the existing windows to match those in the extension/conversion
• Redecorating most of the rest of the house, including replacing carpets with laminate etc...

As far as the conversion itself goes, the pros are:

• It would add value to the house: probably about what it would cost to build
• It would give t'lad a much better bedroom
• We could get in that second po...
• Himself would have lovely office rather than filling the dining room with work...
• While all the building materials would have to come through the house, we are already used to this!

 Where the actual build is concerned:

• There is plenty of landing space for a stair to the loft
• We have good headspace in the loft
• The loft is an older construction, which is an open, tent-shaped space the size of the ground floor of the house!
• There are other rear dormered extensions in the row
• We would probably not need planning permission
• Building the shower room and po above the existing bathroom would make use of the existing soil pipe...  No big drainage alterations
• It wouldn't add a bedroom, and we'd only be increasing the capacity of the house to 6 rather than 5 people, so it wouldn't add too significantly to the drain capacity needed.
• We wouldn't need to increase the central heating boiler capacity, as it is over spec for the size of house we have now
• Best estimates are it would take 8-10 weeks.  It would be hell while it lasted, but once it was done, we'd have a lovely house.

Possible disadvantages:

• It might mean we go into a higher council tax band...  This would only come into effect if the house was sold
• We'd have less storage space in the house than we do now, by volume.  Mind you, we do have a hell of a lot of crap up there, as well as my stash and spare bedding...  We could get by after a damned good chuck-out!  And we do have a huge (3m by 5m!) storage shed up the garden...

Right now I'm thinking we could save a lot of dosh by getting all the structural work and the central heating and water pipe plumbing done by the builders and doing the less structural stuff such as floor laying (i.e. laying the laminate, not the floorboards) and building internal walls, fitting the bathroom and doing the eletrics, plus the decorating ourselves.  Between the three of us, we have all the skills.  We have done stuff like this before.  Himself and the GMNT are decent carpenters, and Himself is a good sparks (though not with bit of paper...  He could get that).  The GMNT is a great provider of muscle power.

If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, it might help...  We are well aware of what could go wrong, after the debacle that was Little Sis's remodeling (she sacked the builders and several people at the local buildings inspectorate lots their jobs over back-handers and passing work that was structurally dangerous!).  I am getting quotes in from a couple of local chaps that I've had work for me before (one was brought up three doors down from here and I've known him since he was a teenager.  He built my conservatory.  The other replaced all next doors windows and did a very fine job on my soffats and guttering).  I'm also getting quotes from some other folk, contacted via the FMB.