Extension and Loft Conversion Build Thread
Discussion
Mark Benson said:
With 'matching' brickwork (OK, it's not great close up, but it's the best we can find and hopefully will placate the planners):
Good thread, good build. So did anything come of this with the not quite so matching brickwork? I'm not entirely sure what the planners would do if the original bricks are no longer manufactured or available.
Antony Moxey said:
Mark Benson said:
Good thread, good build. So did anything come of this with the not quite so matching brickwork? I'm not entirely sure what the planners would do if the original bricks are no longer manufactured or available.I suggested the call me if they were concerned and I got an email back saying that it was fine.
Flood update: Poo sucking truck has sucked about half the water away. I mentioned to the man in the truck that foul water was draining into the stream that runs down the side of the house and it seems to have unlocked a previously unseen army of water workers.
Contamination of fresh water with sewage is a serious business, and they're going hell-for-leather to get it fixed now
Update:
Water drained, grot remains. The drain has been blocked by the maintenance sub-contractors damaging a sleeve fitted inside the 9" drain to stop tree roots growing into the pipes and blocking them (1970s clay pipe drains - the tree roots were growing through the joints so a few years ago they fitted a 1m long fibreglass sleeve).
Cleanup won't be for a while, they need to repair or bypass the blockage first.
Builders will get a few days off I think.
Edited by Mark Benson on Thursday 7th March 14:59
After last weeks deluge of s
t, this week has been pretty good.
Water company were as good as their word and did a thorough clean up of the mess, disinfectant, the lot and the builders only lost a day.
They ran out of matching bricks for the retaining wall, so we're waiting for one of the two packs left in the country (supposedly) to land next week but Mark and Kit cracked on with laying the slabs:
Which, by this afternoon looked great:
Needs pointing still but it's transformed the site - very pleased.
Inside, the gas fire people have been and the last bits of plastering in the sitting room have been done, my wife put a mist coat on the majority of the plasterwork last week with the sprayer so we reckon she'll be able to start painting proper next week.
We've left the surround off ready for painting but this gives a good idea of how it'll look. Loads of heat comes from it but I'm not sure how often we'll actually use it. Anyway, keeps the wife happy
Plumbers also connected up the underfloor heating in the extension, so there's warm water flowing through the slab, meaning we should be in a position to lay the floor in a week or two.
So the plan is that next week we'll start the interior finish on the sitting room, then the week after I should be in a position to lay the wooden floor and then we can get back in there - currently we're living in the kitchen-diner and it's starting to lose it's appeal....
...and the entrance to the sitting room is taped off:
Getting into the new sitting room is tantalisingly close now but we're determined not to cut corners.
We bought a new corner sofa at the weekend and my wife found a second hand wooden cabinet thing we're going to use for the TV (another bargain transported by the cheap van we bought) - the plan is for the low ceilinged end of the room to be a TV/slob area, and the new part with the high ceiling to be more 'adult' for reading/looking at the expensive patio slabs/thinking about mowing the grass etc.
t, this week has been pretty good.Water company were as good as their word and did a thorough clean up of the mess, disinfectant, the lot and the builders only lost a day.
They ran out of matching bricks for the retaining wall, so we're waiting for one of the two packs left in the country (supposedly) to land next week but Mark and Kit cracked on with laying the slabs:
Which, by this afternoon looked great:
Needs pointing still but it's transformed the site - very pleased.
Inside, the gas fire people have been and the last bits of plastering in the sitting room have been done, my wife put a mist coat on the majority of the plasterwork last week with the sprayer so we reckon she'll be able to start painting proper next week.
We've left the surround off ready for painting but this gives a good idea of how it'll look. Loads of heat comes from it but I'm not sure how often we'll actually use it. Anyway, keeps the wife happy
Plumbers also connected up the underfloor heating in the extension, so there's warm water flowing through the slab, meaning we should be in a position to lay the floor in a week or two.
So the plan is that next week we'll start the interior finish on the sitting room, then the week after I should be in a position to lay the wooden floor and then we can get back in there - currently we're living in the kitchen-diner and it's starting to lose it's appeal....
...and the entrance to the sitting room is taped off:
Getting into the new sitting room is tantalisingly close now but we're determined not to cut corners.
We bought a new corner sofa at the weekend and my wife found a second hand wooden cabinet thing we're going to use for the TV (another bargain transported by the cheap van we bought) - the plan is for the low ceilinged end of the room to be a TV/slob area, and the new part with the high ceiling to be more 'adult' for reading/looking at the expensive patio slabs/thinking about mowing the grass etc.
Builders don't have much left to finish outside now, it's down to us now to do the interior finishes on phase 1.
We're starting with the sitting room since we'll then be able to move out of the dining room so this week is painting which my wife is doing.
To do the ceilings we've brought the sprayer out again - much easier than a roller, especially in the vaulted ceiling and the builder has kindly left us trestles and boards to reach more easily:
The end wall will be papered but we're getting a professional in to do that, the paper costs £80-odd a roll and the last time we tried to hang paper we wasted an awful lot so that's best left to someone who knows what they're doing, especially with the shape and the prominence of the wall, it has to look good as it's the first thing you'll see walking into the room.
However, my wife is a dab hand with a brush (is a graphic designer by training, although she's a seamstress now) so she's on the case with the painting:
Colour is Fired Earth 'Old Cream', mixed by the local Dulux Trade centre. Looks yellow in some lights, green in others and works well in a big space:
Builders should be back for bits and bobs outside over the next couple of weeks, but Jon the main contractor is giving us a few weeks to catch up in the new part of the house as the loft conversion will be disruptive in the part of the house we're currently living in. It also gives him time to finish off another project that's dividing his time at the moment and should mean he can devote most of his attention to the loft conversion once it's started.
We're starting with the sitting room since we'll then be able to move out of the dining room so this week is painting which my wife is doing.
To do the ceilings we've brought the sprayer out again - much easier than a roller, especially in the vaulted ceiling and the builder has kindly left us trestles and boards to reach more easily:
The end wall will be papered but we're getting a professional in to do that, the paper costs £80-odd a roll and the last time we tried to hang paper we wasted an awful lot so that's best left to someone who knows what they're doing, especially with the shape and the prominence of the wall, it has to look good as it's the first thing you'll see walking into the room.
However, my wife is a dab hand with a brush (is a graphic designer by training, although she's a seamstress now) so she's on the case with the painting:
Colour is Fired Earth 'Old Cream', mixed by the local Dulux Trade centre. Looks yellow in some lights, green in others and works well in a big space:
Builders should be back for bits and bobs outside over the next couple of weeks, but Jon the main contractor is giving us a few weeks to catch up in the new part of the house as the loft conversion will be disruptive in the part of the house we're currently living in. It also gives him time to finish off another project that's dividing his time at the moment and should mean he can devote most of his attention to the loft conversion once it's started.
So - flooring.
I took a couple of days off earlier this week to tackle the wooden floor. We have engineered oak running through the kitchen diner into the sitting room and we wanted to continue it into the extension.
Unfortunately the flooring we bought 6 years ago when we moved in isn't available any more, so we went to the local timber merchants with an offcut and found the best match in tone and colour we could, with a view to integrating the old and new.
What we didn't want was a threshold down the middle of the room and neither did we want to junk 20 square metres of perfectly good flooring then buy that amount again in the new stuff just so it matched.
So when the screed was laid for the new floor, we got the concrete guy to make the heights of old and new floor exactly the same so we could run the floor straight from old part to new.
Then at the weekend I started to cut into the existing floor to leave me with something to insert the new flooring into, that way we wouldn't have a line of cut boards across the middle of the room:
Then, with the help of a piece of scrap wood and a 2lb hammer, I began to insert the new boards into the gaps:
Which got tougher the further in the new board got:
However once a new board was in, it was just a case of backfilling round the walls and door, which was, if not simple then at least not as strength sapping as hitting the end of a board repeatedly and watching it move a couple of mm at a time into the gap:
Some of the boards didn't have the tongue and groove on the end (the ones that were cut in the original installation to butt up against the patio doors) so I used a biscuit jointer to secure the new boards into them:
It took about a day to lay the floor, but one thing I knew I had to do was level the new boards down to the height of the old ones. The new boards are just over 1mm proud when inserted into the old ones, which is noticable when the light is coming from behind:
So out with the plane to take the majority of the wood away:
Then the orbital sander to smooth out the joins and refinish the old boards:
I've oiled the floor and fitted skirting since then, but forgot to take pictures. We have the decorator coming in the next few days to hang the paper on the end wall, so once that's done I'll take some pictures of the finished room.
One room down, 5 to go......
I took a couple of days off earlier this week to tackle the wooden floor. We have engineered oak running through the kitchen diner into the sitting room and we wanted to continue it into the extension.
Unfortunately the flooring we bought 6 years ago when we moved in isn't available any more, so we went to the local timber merchants with an offcut and found the best match in tone and colour we could, with a view to integrating the old and new.
What we didn't want was a threshold down the middle of the room and neither did we want to junk 20 square metres of perfectly good flooring then buy that amount again in the new stuff just so it matched.
So when the screed was laid for the new floor, we got the concrete guy to make the heights of old and new floor exactly the same so we could run the floor straight from old part to new.
Then at the weekend I started to cut into the existing floor to leave me with something to insert the new flooring into, that way we wouldn't have a line of cut boards across the middle of the room:
Then, with the help of a piece of scrap wood and a 2lb hammer, I began to insert the new boards into the gaps:
Which got tougher the further in the new board got:
However once a new board was in, it was just a case of backfilling round the walls and door, which was, if not simple then at least not as strength sapping as hitting the end of a board repeatedly and watching it move a couple of mm at a time into the gap:
Some of the boards didn't have the tongue and groove on the end (the ones that were cut in the original installation to butt up against the patio doors) so I used a biscuit jointer to secure the new boards into them:
It took about a day to lay the floor, but one thing I knew I had to do was level the new boards down to the height of the old ones. The new boards are just over 1mm proud when inserted into the old ones, which is noticable when the light is coming from behind:
So out with the plane to take the majority of the wood away:
Then the orbital sander to smooth out the joins and refinish the old boards:
I've oiled the floor and fitted skirting since then, but forgot to take pictures. We have the decorator coming in the next few days to hang the paper on the end wall, so once that's done I'll take some pictures of the finished room.
One room down, 5 to go......
We're having a bit of a breather, both for us to get the extension finished and for Jon the builder to clear his calendar of other jobs - he wants a clear run at the loft as that way we won't have holes in the roof for too long.
He's been great actually, my daughter's lung condition menas that dust needs to be kept at a minimum, we had no dust in the house during the extension build and the aim is the same for the loft build, so he plans to build a scoffold tower at the front of the house and have access for as long as possible through the Velux holes, rather than the easier route of opening up access for the stairs (right in the centre of the house which would mean sealing off would be almost impossible).
In the meantime, we've finished the sitting room (apart from a sideboard/TV stand I want to make, it's a hobby).
The evening end, for curling up to watch TV....
...and the new part, the bit we spend most time in with access to the garden which we've really appreciated in the nice weather this weekend.
We're chuffed at how it came out and how usable it all is.
We hope to finish the garden in the next couple of months so we can use it fully in summer, currently we can't decde whether to just go for artifical grass or bring in more topsoil and go for turf. Currently I'm thinking favouring artificial if we can find some that's realistic enough:
We've also emptied our old shed into the new store and I've started to demolish it.
We're going to build a garden shelter using two of the walls of the shed on top of a base in the corner of the garden, here:
And in the other corner, behind the extension is the patio area for the washing line, which my wife is unnaturally excited about and access to the lane behind the house.
He's been great actually, my daughter's lung condition menas that dust needs to be kept at a minimum, we had no dust in the house during the extension build and the aim is the same for the loft build, so he plans to build a scoffold tower at the front of the house and have access for as long as possible through the Velux holes, rather than the easier route of opening up access for the stairs (right in the centre of the house which would mean sealing off would be almost impossible).
In the meantime, we've finished the sitting room (apart from a sideboard/TV stand I want to make, it's a hobby).
The evening end, for curling up to watch TV....
...and the new part, the bit we spend most time in with access to the garden which we've really appreciated in the nice weather this weekend.
We're chuffed at how it came out and how usable it all is.
We hope to finish the garden in the next couple of months so we can use it fully in summer, currently we can't decde whether to just go for artifical grass or bring in more topsoil and go for turf. Currently I'm thinking favouring artificial if we can find some that's realistic enough:
We've also emptied our old shed into the new store and I've started to demolish it.
We're going to build a garden shelter using two of the walls of the shed on top of a base in the corner of the garden, here:
And in the other corner, behind the extension is the patio area for the washing line, which my wife is unnaturally excited about and access to the lane behind the house.
1970s flimsy looking trusses. We're getting big steels across and (I think) vertically supporting the roof.
We toyed with the idea of removing the roof and starting with loft trusses but couldn't stomach the mess and the loss of all the downstairs ceilings, the costs were similar in both cases.
We toyed with the idea of removing the roof and starting with loft trusses but couldn't stomach the mess and the loss of all the downstairs ceilings, the costs were similar in both cases.
Edited by Mark Benson on Wednesday 24th April 11:28
Mark Benson said:
1970s flimsy looking trusses. We're getting big steels across and (I think) vertically supporting the roof.
We toyed with the idea of removing the roof and starting with loft trusses but couldn't stomach the mess and the loss of all the downstairs ceilings the costs were similar in both cases.
Same, need steel beams for loft due to trusses although bizarrely, I already have steel beams in my loft, so they may be ok. Any idea of rough cost per sqft/sqm for your conversion?We toyed with the idea of removing the roof and starting with loft trusses but couldn't stomach the mess and the loss of all the downstairs ceilings the costs were similar in both cases.
I'm doing this the other way around, loft first, extension after.
I think the mess is over-blown to be honest, I've been using the loft hatch and cut a 1500 x 600 hole in the ceiling above the stairs so I could lift some 5m steels in. That isn't sealed and hasn't really made a mess anywhere.
I took 80 bags of loose-fill insulation and general filth out first, I did that before I cut the hole and just kept the loft hatch shut, stripped off before coming down and again that was fine. I managed to lower all those bags down through the new hole and carry them out the house without making a mess either.
That's the properly messy work done now really. I'll have the stairs in quite soon and will then seal the larger opening with battens and plastic sheet to keep the mess up. I'll also give the loft space a proper going over with the hoover when the floor is finished as most of the 'new' dust will be caused by old dust being disturbed again rather than from cutting and drilling.
I know your circumstances are different, but I'm sure you could go a few steps further and have no issues. Might be worth looking at depending on how big a hole you'd need for steels and whether they'll go in better from below. Mine was fairly easy, straight run in from the front door, up the stairs, stand them up through the hole and yoink (technical term) them into the loft. I have a 6m Glulam left to lift up, that'll fit too with just the small hole.
I think the mess is over-blown to be honest, I've been using the loft hatch and cut a 1500 x 600 hole in the ceiling above the stairs so I could lift some 5m steels in. That isn't sealed and hasn't really made a mess anywhere.
I took 80 bags of loose-fill insulation and general filth out first, I did that before I cut the hole and just kept the loft hatch shut, stripped off before coming down and again that was fine. I managed to lower all those bags down through the new hole and carry them out the house without making a mess either.
That's the properly messy work done now really. I'll have the stairs in quite soon and will then seal the larger opening with battens and plastic sheet to keep the mess up. I'll also give the loft space a proper going over with the hoover when the floor is finished as most of the 'new' dust will be caused by old dust being disturbed again rather than from cutting and drilling.
I know your circumstances are different, but I'm sure you could go a few steps further and have no issues. Might be worth looking at depending on how big a hole you'd need for steels and whether they'll go in better from below. Mine was fairly easy, straight run in from the front door, up the stairs, stand them up through the hole and yoink (technical term) them into the loft. I have a 6m Glulam left to lift up, that'll fit too with just the small hole.
soupdragon1 said:
Same, need steel beams for loft due to trusses although bizarrely, I already have steel beams in my loft, so they may be ok. Any idea of rough cost per sqft/sqm for your conversion?
It's roughly 50m2 and the estimate came in at £38k, he's been spot on with amount charged vs estimate so I wouldn't expect that to rise too much which makes if £760/m2.That's plastered but no finishes and we're supplying sanitaryware.
Chicken Chaser said:
Mark looks great, a really nicely done job. Please don't spoil it by buying plastic grass though, nothing better than a well cut lawn.
I know, I know, but the fence shades all the light (garden is south facing) and the soiul banked up is full of clay - now I know why the grass we had was full of moss every year. Frankly I got sick of trying to keep on top of it.But as I said, it'll have to look good for us to go for it.
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