Background

We bought this house back in May 2008 with the intention of extending it to make a good sized family home. The previous owner of the house sadly died in November 2007. He lived there since the house was originally built back in 1939.

When we purchased the house it was in need of a lot of work. The heating and hot water was not working, the windows needed replacing and the garden was very overgrown. It was the perfect property to gut and refit.

This is going to be a huge project and an interesting and perhaps stressfull few months ahead. It would be nice if we could have the house ready for mid February 2009, ideally before my birthday.

It will be a lot of work as the property is on a slope and we will need to excavate a lot of the earth to the side and back of the existing house in order to get the layout we want.

We intended to exend the house at the back by 3.5m which and at the the side by 4m. We also wanted to excavate the side of the house to allow us to have a lower level garage under the new side extension. This would be a double garage extending out 5.3m on the side. This is possible as the house is higher then the road level.


Hopefully this should give us 3 good sized reception rooms downstairs with a decent sized kitchen, and 4 bedrooms upstairs (2 with en-suite), a bathroom and a study (which is currently the box bedroom) upstairs.

It has been a bit of an uphill struggle with the local planning department we have finally got the planning application passed albeit with a few concessions like reducing the extension at the rear from 3.5m to 3m and having a steep sloping roof on the side with a dormer window for the new front first floor bedroom which will greatly reduce the usable space in the room.