Loft conversions - anyone had one?

[IlanaK]

I am in the process of moving at the moment and am looking at 3 bedrooms houses with the potential to convert the loft.

Some of the houses I look at have very high pointed roofs that I assume would leave space for a proper bedroom/bathroom. Some though have just a normal pitched roof which doesn't seem to leave much space. And yet, on the same road, other similar houses have got windows in the roof so presumably have had a loft conversion. Do you end up with a very unusable bedroom in this situation?

Also, what does a loft conversion cost? I know it will differ house to house, but a ball park figure would be great as I have no idea!

Thanks!

bump

If you view a house, make sure you go into the loft. if you can astand up comfortbaly in the loft then you can probabl;y convert. Also if similar houses have doen it, you should be fine. Our room is a loft room, it cost about £35k including 2 bathrooms, moving stairs etc. it is a lovely room, the opposite of 'unusable' You wouldn't go through that mess and expense for an unusable room!

Thanks for that. Good tip about actually going up into the loft and standing up. Stairs is an intersting point I hadn't thought of. I presume you need to make sure that there is space in the hallway for stairs to go up?

The loft stairs usually go above the existing stairs, so you go up flight one, along the landing, and turn back on yourself over the first staircase.

There has to be a viable means of escape that doesn't mean going trough a habitable room which is why we had to have our stairs flippped around and a hallway made, otherwise the stairs opened up directly onto the dining room.

We had one done in our old house which was a 3 bed terrace and became a 4 bed. We had a huge room about 20' x 15' with the staircase partly partitioning the room which meant we used one side as an office and other side as playroom/spare bedroom. We didn't go for bath/shower room as we didn't feel we needed it. We just moved in the summer to a 3 bed house and borrowed extra money so we could convert the loft again. What we hadn't realised though is that as this is a semi with a hipped roof it is more problematic - hence more expensive. We can still do it but the room is going to be more smaller than in our old house and it's obviously going to be more expensive - also if we were to put in an en-suite (which we'd like to here) then it makes the main part of the room even smaller obviously. There are lots of options for stairs - in our old house we had around 6 lots of people round and they all said stairs would need to come out of one of the bedrooms - it was only by chance when the building society valuer came round and said don't you realise you can have your stairs over the existing staircase that we felt happy to go ahead as we weren't losing a smaller bedroom for a larger room. So I would say really look into it. If you really want to convert the loft I would get someone to go around and have a look and give you a rough estimate before you exchange/offer so you know what your options are! Our old one cost £28k in 2003 and we are now getting quotes of £30-32k for our new one. Hope this helps.