Raising the Roof

[analoguejobs]

Hello - can anyone please advise on the following ?

We live in a two bedroom chalet style house - built 1950 - and would like to add two further bedrooms via a loft conversion.

There is no room to do a normal loft conversion - the pictures below show the problem:

- can we "un-chalet" the house ? i.e. make the profile of the house rectangular so we gain more space in the current bedrooms and put on a new roof that can accommodate a velux type conversion ?

This seems to me to be horribly complex and expensive ? Let alone planning permission.

In terms of cost benefit - a two bedroom house like this is =A3350k and to buy a four bedroom in the same area would be maybe =A3500k

Thanks

Phil

[Bruce]

I suspect that getting building control approval will be at least as much of a challenge.

You would be raising the height of the external brick walls and probably one internal structural wall, putting additional load on to the existing foundations. It is likely that the foundations won't be considered sufficient for this, so building control may expect the existing footings to be underpinned, or piled. Not cheap, unless you can prove that your house is built on footings that are supported directly on bedrock, when you might be OK.

The first thing you should do is look around the area and see if any houses similar to yours have been modified in the way you suggest. If so, try to find out exactly what was done, and when, with particular reference to the foundations. A few years ago it might have been possible to do what you are suggesting while leaving the existing foundations alone. But the aftermath of the many hot summers in the past couple of decades (in terms of clay shrinkage and the resulting settlement) has not surprisingly made building control very cautious.

Your first port of call should be a chat with the building control officers at the local council offices. You will get a good idea of what is possible, and what isn't, from their reaction when you tell them what you would like to do.

Good luck! It would be an interesting project.

[dennis]

To pull it down and build a new one would cost less, seriously.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember [e-mail] saying something like:

You don't need to raise the existing walls - you can put on new profile roof trusses that will immediately form a new storey, albeit still with dormer-style windows. I was involved with one last year and it was very successful, gaining three full-height bedrooms upstairs with en-suites and and a new seperate bathroom. The advantage of doing it this way is the foundations will (should) cope with the load as it's not much more than the existing load and it's relatively quick. As always - employ a professional to advise you; such a job isn't cheap and it's not worth cutting corners.

[Bob Minchin]

Having raised my roof to make a chalet from a bungalow some years ago, the planners were the biggest hurdle. In the end I got it through becuase we had a bungalow one side and a standard house on the other. Raising my roof to a median height compared to my neighbours was seen to be acceptable. Recently my bungalow neighbour has also gone chalet style and PP was even easier for him as it brought his roof into line with mine! If both your neighbours have similar height building to yours then you might have trouble with the planners. Building control problems can normally be over come one way or another because the structure can be made to comply by design. But the planners have no such hard and fast rules and can pass or fail on aesthetic grounds. I'd consult them first with some photos and sketches of what you propose in relation to your neighbours.

What really p's me off is that planners can approve hideous changes in the high street or other commercial structures quite out of keeping with adjacent buildings but in a street of dwellings, building seem to have to blend in!

Good luck

Bob

[Bruce]

That seems quite reasonable to me. It might be OK to work or shop in a dump, but who would want to live in one?

[Owain]

People often have more choice of where they live than where they work or shop. There's only one shopping centre near me, but a fairly wide choice of housing. And far more people look at the outside of commercial buildings in a town centre than ever see an individual dwelling in a residential side street.

Owain