So after a long, hard slog of getting council planners, building control, surveyors, architects and, at the final hurdle, neighbours all agreed on our loft conversion work finally starts!
It’s worth noting that the latter mentioned here is an important one and a lesson learnt is that clear, honest communication with neighbours really is the most important factor of any building works or improvements you plan on making to your home.
We already had a consented stair case leading to 2 rooms in the roof, one into a non gabled end of the roofspace (correct term?) and another to the party wall, both however had restricted head space to the front and rear – not that useful to someone of my height…
Ours plans to place a double dormer to the rear to give full head clearance and a whole lot more floor space to the rooms, plus a single dormer on the front for a shower room were fairly straight forward and precedence is abundant in our road – several have already done what we want to do.
So planning had their day, minor adjustments to the sizes of windows, some questions about how the visual aspect would affect the road etc but it wasn’t that painful – just a necessary evil.
I’ll come back to neighbours in another post, suffice to say at the moment that a well informed neighbour is much less likely to ask friends and relatives (who will probably be ill-informed) and then start throwing spanners into your works…
