Hip to gable roof

[glamourousindierockandroll]

We need our roof replaced due to wear and tear. In time, we'd like to do a loft conversion to add a bedroom but we are not ready to do the full conversion at the moment due to interest rates. Our plan for the time being is to basically add the gable and probably board the loft.

Does anyone have any experience of the cost of this? The roofer who came to do a quick repair this week suggest c.£5000 for a new roof, but that was before we had discussed the hip to gable idea.

Bump.

No idea about cost but you may need planning permission as you are changing the profile of your roof.

That's interesting to know. Most information I've read suggests that it's withing permitted development and we're not in a protected area or anything like that.

Quite expensive I would think. They need to take about a third of the roof off.
what was the £5k quote for? Stripping, new felt, batons and retiling?
You could consider having the gable made timber frame and tile hung rather than brickwork.

The £5k quite was for new tiles and felt etc, assuming the timber frame was OK.

I've seen around £40k quoted for a simple, unfurnished loft conversion, so I was wondering if we could just get the basic shell done for now (no windows, stairs, electrics or anything) rather than getting a new hipped roof on, only to have to redo it in future.

You can certainly do it that way but you would also need to think about the loft conversion itself, the method you would use and any steels that would need to be in place. You don’t really want to have a nice new roof only to have to take it all off again for the loft conversion (ok I know they do it through a hole but still). When we had this problem we just limped the roof along with spot fixes and buckets until we were ready to do the whole thing.

Our loft conversion cost an extra £10000 on the standard price because we needed our hip roof to be made gable.

This is all really hepful, thank you.

I think I would definitely speak to an experienced builder and explain what I'm aiming for. Depending on what quotes they come back with, I might even feel able to stretch to a local architect for drawings so that we have the correct structure in place for the future.

I wish we could just go for it but our mortgage deal is up in 2024 so I'm really not keen to take on more debt in the meantime.