Home Extension Thread 2018 - summer edition

[DustandRubble]

A thread to share the highs and lows of all things extension, loft conversion, renovation related. Bring your own dustpan and brush.

9GreenI thought that was a picture of your bath at first (not got my glasses on)! Glad your build starting to reach the final stages. Chocolate I don’t know how you’ve coped so heavily pregnant. You deserve a very large medal.

Filo, I feel your pain. We’ve had to take out extra insurance for our build but we primarily did this because we’re not living in. Without it we wouldn’t have been covered for fire/theft or for the builders scarpering without finishing so we figured we needed the policy. It was extortionate though and we couldn’t even get our normal insurance company to cover us. Like you we got stung on two lots of party wall agreements (which was completely galling), and I was recently sent a bill from the council for pavement repairs to damage they insist has been made by our builders/skips etc. Tried to fight that but they’ve refused to back down on it. Oh, and it’s cost us nearly £1500 we weren’t expecting to move the gas and electric meters. It’s just endless isn’t it! I had so many lovely plans for new furniture and interior bits once the house was built. At this rate I’ll be lucky if we can splash out on an Argos bean bag.

Argos Bean Bag

Hippo I just know we're going to be in this situation. The design process has gone on for sooooooo long (incompetent architect) that we have had time to fall in love with wildly expensive tiles, kitchens etc, and it's going to be such a blow when we have £3.84 left to furnish the entire house after the building work is finished .

Chocolate I can't imagine living through a build and being heavily pregnant, you must be made of stern stuff!

We got semi-final plans yesterday (for some reason the architect hasn't ignored two amendments we asked for ), just waiting for elevations and we will be looking at fiiiiiiiinally applying for planning permission. I'll load a pic of our plans up when I'm on my computer later.

HAS ignored!

Argos bean bag lol!

That's about the stage we are at unfortunately. We are down to our last £££ and having to decide what to buy and what to leave. Our hallway desperately needs painting but that might have to wait as it also needs new flooring (ruined by the building work). We have had to put some new furniture on interest free credit from NEXT which is actually a good deal but not something we usually do!

Life is so expensive!

Today is the first day in 4 week my son is at nursery and there is nobody here. Ahhhhhhhhh it's lovely lol.
I had a terrible first birth so this is a good distraction from iminent arrival!
I think the plasterer is due to plaster the house this week although the guy in charge is going on holiday today for a few days so not sure how that will affect progress.
We have a slight excess budget of 35k however that is for kitchen, bathroom fixtures, carpet and decorating. I am thinking it should be enough but everything seems so expensive! I also need to get my son new furniture as he won't have any as all going to the baby, well he has a bed lol.

Hopefully,

I am with you. Trying to extend a bungalow and planning stage is taking forever!

We had the concrete poured for the floor yesterday, and now the weather is crap. Dry concrete, dry!

Floor inside Dust&Rubble or outside?

It will take ages if inside warning. We are still waiting.

We have submitted for planning permission this week . Did you all get permission or did you have to appeal ( is that even a thing?) or anyone get denied permission? We want to do a ground floor extension that no one can actually see but who knows if it will be allowed .

Outside Mrs Blondie. Just the foundation, we have beams to go in on top.

We submitted our plans last month for a double storey rear extension and some changes to the front also. One set of neighbours objected (we thought they would). Our other neighbours are lovely and have been really encouraging. Fingers crossed for the next few weeks.

I am getting really scared about how much this will cost us. Argos bean bags might be an excellent idea.

We had ours turned down twice and went through on appeal, we are finally starting 2 years after we appointed our architect :(

Hippo do you mind telling me who you used and the cost insurance wise? Pm if you like :)

That's interesting that you can appeal although it's only a single storey so not like we can reduce it . I haven't managed to get any quotes yet . No one would quite without planning permission so we thought we would throw some money at it and see if we get permission first before we try and get a builder . Nothing ventured and all that . 🙏🏻🙏🏻... I'm hoping for £70 but I fear it will be £100k plus .. ( south east )

No problems with planning here. We did have permitted development refused as they calculated us as being too big. Nobody objected as far as I know. We did get queries about our porch in case it was not in keeping with the street. But as our street is a mess of styles they let it go.

We had no issue with planning either, although due to an imcompetant 1st architect, we did have to resubmit. I found that bit so hard, spending so much money on drawings and plans, etc.
Builders still doing well and we're still coping fine. Our poor dogs are none too impressed that the garden ( covered in vast swathes of black plastic in an attempt to beat the ground elder into submission ) is totally off limits. Kids have resorted to playing swingball and netball on the drive, between the skip and the caravan. We have such curb appeal at the moment!!
Having to chase our window man which is a bit bloody annoying too.

We were refused first time with planning and then eventually had to employ a consultant, at more expense, to help get it through. The resulting design isn’t perfect (as we’re discovering) but it is certainly the maximum we would ever get past the planners. Having said that we are in a notoriously difficult area for planning and had we submitted our original scheme elsewhere in the country we’d probavly have got through without a hitch.

Filo we used Hiscox for our insurance who are great however it’s cost us a fortune. I think it was around £1500 for 6 months although we are doing an almost full rebuild. Everything apart from the front wall of the original house has been demolished and so it’s been far more complex than a standard extension or renovation. Friends of mine have used them for more straightforward schemes and cost has been nowhere near as high. We also had to be approved by the underwriters as the astronomical cost of our build made us higher risk. I’m sure the premiums would have been lower otherwise.

Meanwhile yesterday’s news is that I think we have an advanced case of dry rot!! Thankfully not in the house we are building (probably because there’s nothing of it left standing) but in the house we are renting. Landlord coming out with more specialists today. It seems like every house I touch right now is determined to cause me problems!

What would you need extra insurance for ? Is that something everyone gets ? Thanks

Bobkate - we are thinking of doing an extension a bit like yours and our house looks the same. Out of interest how far is your extension going out from the original back wall? It looks about 4m which is what we are hoping to get.

As one side of our house is on the boundary I think we are only going up on 2 levels on the side away from the boundary, but the ground floor bit will go across the whole of the back like yours.

hendricksy We needed extra insurance as our normal building insurance wouldn’t cover us once the work started. That was partly because the property was going to be empty for over a year and also because of the scale of work we were doing. In our case we needed to make sure we were covered still against fire etc, any damage to our land or neighbours which we couldn’t prove was due to builders, theft if the site got broken into and most importantly, because of the scale and cost of the build, we wanted to be covered if the builders absconded and didn’t finish the job. In this policy if that happened our insurance would cover the build being finished.

I don’t know if everyone would need it. Our build is huge but I’m not sure I would have forked out if we were doing suomething more contained. I guess it’s worth looking to see what your current policy covers. I think the main worry otherwise is that something would be found/happen during the build that you would need to claim on your building insurance for and they refuse to pay out because you didn’t tell them you were doing renovations.

Hope that helps and makes sense!

I have not got any costs yet. We did talk to a couple of builders and told them we had around 100k to spend. They did not run away! I am hoping we can do it for 150k, with maybe needing to find some extra for kitchen and bathrooms. Our extension is 4.3m x 9.5m for the ground floor and 3.3 x 9.5m for the first floor. I think 3 steels will be required.

Thank you @HippoJones

We are hoping to convert the integral garage to living and build a garage in a different place . Does anyone fancy giving me a ballpark ( just for fun😬😬)