Hi
Im' on the south coast in Hampshire and we're thinking of having a loft conversion done to create an extra bedroom and small bathroom (just shower cubicle, WC and hand basin). We live in a late victorian mid terraced bay & forcourt style house. We've been here for 16yrs and have 3 daughters, the two younger share bunkbeds in the middle bedroom and the eldest has the tiny box room at the back. We paid £55k for the house back in '97 and judging by the local property market, could sell it for about £175k now, so there is plenty of equity. My DH and children are happy in this area, settled in school etc so don't particularly want to move.
A specialist loft conversion company came round last week because I wanted to know if it was viable, ref height clearance etc, and he confirmed that it was (albeit borderline, and suggested lowering the ceilings in the first floor - only on landing and two smaller bedrooms).
He said that we'd have to get a party wall notice signed by both neighbours before work could go ahead (permitted development).
Just wondered how much that would cost, especially if one side objected and had their own surveyor (at our cost). The loft conversion would set us back between £25k and £30k. Neighbours on one side would be fine - young housemates/students in rented house. The other side might want to be arsy for the sake of it because when they had a single story extension build last year our property - garden fence was damaged and we had to press them to put it right. They did their work via a cowboy builder under permitted development (for £8K!) so they were quite cocky about not needing planning approval, but they didn't give us proper notice either, certainly no party wall notice etc (in fact their builder didn't know anything about them and their excavations for their foundations were adjacent to my patio. Their work started in March and went right through to late summer (power tools, evenings, weekends, bank hols etc). Literally, as he and my husband came home from work on the Monday he just said "Oh, by the way, that wall's coming down soon", and the next we knew about it was a few days later on the Saturday morning when the work started! We objected to all the mess coming in our house (everything was covered in thick dust everytime we opened a window throughout the whole spring/summer).
Our dining table is in our kitchen, so even when we sat down for meals and looked up there would be one of their workers possibly looking in!
Sorry! I digress, just am worried that they'd be obstructive because of last year's problems. Incidently, they & their builder parted company under bad terms and they had to get someone else in the rectify problems.
Thank you for reading through this and I'd appreciate your feedback.
TIA