Converting One Bed Victorian Flat

Yasmin02

Hi All,

After some peoples opinions/advice. I moved into my one bed victorian ground floor flat just over 3 years ago now. I have a 50ft garden its quite an old property (built in 1900's) and the kitchen and bathroon are towards the back of the property. I want to buidl an additional room into the garden/decking area. I have a number of questions
1 Does anyone hve an estiatmate of how much this would typically cost?
2 Would i need planning permission?
3 On average how long would it take to build?
I am considering getting an artchitect is are there any other ways of going around it and what do i need to know from the outset?

THanks in advance for any advice.
Kind Regards
Yasmin

Doozergirl

You will need planning permission for any extension to a flat, iirc. You will also need permission from your freeholder which will not come for free.

Depends on where you are but a rule of thumb would be £1000 per square metre but I think it's generally more like £1200 upwards completely depending on your fittings and build route. As for how long it takes - well, it's a piece of string question depending on how you want to go about it , how many people work on it and what purpose it serves but you can make it as painless a possible by putting up the shell and only knocking through into the existing flat once it's actually built. You can have a sealed shell easily within a month.

Yasmin02

Hello Dozzergirl thank you very much for your response apologies for my delay. I own a share of the freehold with the person who lives upstairs so i asusme that i will just need the other freedholers consent to build the extension? Thanks for the rough eastimate i think i amy get an architect in to see what potentially could be done as i do not ideally want to move from here but i appear now to be running out of space! kind regards yasmin

Fire_Fox

Might be worth taking to upstairs sooner rather than later as they might like to extend too, you could build a two storey and split the costs. Do you have sole rights over the garden? If not it's possible the lender for upstairs would have to be consulted.

kmmr

Always worth talking to the neighbours, you never know what their plans are. I went out of my way to keep the boundary wall at 2m, and designed a slightly odd roof, as that is what the planners said would be ok.

Now we are doing the party wall stuff (after planning) the neighbours have asked for a higher roof, and for it to straddle the boundary instead of being just inside it - as they may want to use the wall in the future to do a similar extension. Wish I had just asked in the first place! Would have saved a lot of design annoyance!