Loft conversion: Lessons learned

[SternlyVoice]

If you were going to do your loft conversion again, what would you do differently?

We've lived in one house where the loft conversion was a complete bodge. We are now living in another house, where the loft conversion is at least legal but hasn't been designed well - it doesn't make good use of the space and we'd like to fit in an extra bedroomand an ensuite by going into some additional roofspace.

Any advice from you wise mumsnetters would be very welcome!

• Don't discard the skylight/velux above the staircase, in order to cut costs - the natural light would have been most welcome, and since we had to redo the roof (surprise!) mid-project, it wouldn't have been that much more expensive anyway.

• But very thankful we did discard the skylight/velux in the bedroom as it's been noisy enough up there with all the Christmas/New Years storms - I can't imagine the racket with one or two panes of glass above our heads.

• Add even more (sound) insulation that we put in already - storms again, keeping me up at night.

• Upon reflection, probably would have preferred a shower rather than a bath up there, but I think DH would disagree. Could you have both?! or a comfortable shower over bath.

• If replacing windows, make them open outwards to be able to fit internal shutters.

yy, as many windows as you can manage

you get used to the noise mostly

ask about the state of your roof. They took all our ancient tiles off, stacked them neatly, roofers put them all on again. As he left, the last one said 'you should've replaced them, they're like fucking biscuits'

when I asked the foreman why he thought the company director hadn't broached this with us, he looked unhappy and said 'maybe the cost implication' which I took to mean: if it bumped the cost up too much, you wouldn't bother with the works at all

same happened with my friend's lc, done at the same time

love my conversion but still annoyed about this