Splitting one house into two

As readers of some of my previous posts will have gathered, I've recently acquired a run-down 1900's corner terraced house to do up.

It's going to be three bedroomed by the time we've finished. However, we've realised that there is a bricked-up door round the corner from the current front door; and sure enough, there's a house number missing from the sequence in that street. So our house clearly used to be two, many moons ago. This has got us thinking; maybe we would be better off dividing up the property again, and selling it as two separate homes? There's an obvious place to divide it, which would leave the smaller home as what is cuurrently a very large sitting room (which would split into a small sitting room, kitchenette, and stairwell); and a large master bedroom (which would subdivide into shower-room and a smaller, but still double bedroom).

Question is, how do you set about looking into this? The larger house would be easy; other than isolating the electrics, all it needs is two doorways bricking up and it's ready; but for the smaller property we'd obviously need mains water, electricity, sewage etc laying on. There would be no rear access to the property; any soil pipe would need to be on the street - is that a problem? - or internal. What sort of sums are we looking at here, for the getting the new services, legal fees, architects, building control... Is this a viable project? Given local conditions, we believe that the property would sell for 35-45K more if separated.

TIA David

Reply to
Lobster
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As well as talking to your LA about building control, I think you should also talk to them about planning approval. They may have views on the desirability of more houses of a particular size - a problem would seem more likely if you had been wishing to combine two small houses to make a bigger one, but ask before spending money.

Reply to
Brian S Gray

I suspect that if there is documentary evidence that the building was originally two properties the planning department would have no sustainable case to refuse a request to restore it to that. BC is another matter and I suspect that the lack of independent access for the sewerage is likley to be the largest problem.

tim

Reply to
tim

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