Advice on Converting Two Flats into One House

tavueni

Hi There MoneySavingExpert Friends.

I have a question that I could really appreciate some learned and experienced advise on with regards to home conversions.

We have an Edwardian house (1904-1908 built) which was converted into two x two bedroom flats in the late 1960's/early 1970's. We purchased the upstairs property on a repayment mortgage in 2005 and then when the opportunity came up, the downstairs a couple of years later on a buy-to-let with the long term view of converting them back into a single house. Spending a good few days scouring the internet, I've found that what were doing is uncommon considering most people do the opposite (house to flats)

Though we understand that there is likely to be a LOT of work to do this, we find the location, facilities and, ultimately, the final expected size of the full house hard to match if we looked for a standalone house elswhere.

There's LOTS we'd like to do to the property (fully doubleglaze the property, replace the floors/carpets, loft conversion, etc) but as we're looking for this to be our long term home, we're not in a desperate rush to get all this done. We just want to concentrate on the fundamentals of getting the property back into one affordably and then do what we need to over the many years ahead of us.

We've never done something like this before so I'm just looking to ask if anyone else has done this before and for some advice on how to best proceed with this conversion and confirm whether it would be cost effective/realistic for us to do so.

The two key questions I have are:

(1) What are the bare minimum requirements (besides the mortgage) required to have both flats converted to a single house with a single mortgage and roughly how much would it cost to do? The list I've come up with is:

* Planning permission and building control approval for the work )Don't believe we need as both flats were part of one house and we have the land registry details/plans showing the post conversion state of the each property)
* Speak to lenders to arrange single mortgage for upstairs and downstairs
* Secure "Deed of Substituted Security" from banks to move the mortgage into a single freehold title
* Merge the 2 leasehold titles into the freehold title (approx £50 per title from what I can tell)
* Merging gas into single inlet
* Merge central heating into one inlet
* Merging water into single inlet (likely have to get a water meter fitted)
* Merging electricity into single inlet (Do we need to redo all of the electrics?)
* Remove upstairs kitchen
* Pay Capital Gains (?)
* Have council come and remark council tax bracket (council needs to see one front door and one kitchen)

(2) Given the two differing mortgages on each property, what is the best way to merge them back into one? Given the current economy, I'm thinking the only reasonable way of being able to do this is having one of our existing lenders take over the other (if they will at all - I'm planning to speak to both over the coming week) Is there a procedure or process detailing what we'd need to do?

I appreciate there is a lot of information in there but I'd really appreciate some advice and any real life experiences of people having done similar. As I have a growing family, I need to figure out whether it'll be worth our undertaking this project (our preference given all of the benefits of the single house we see) or bite the bullet, make the sacrifices and sell up and get a single house if we can.

Thanks in advance.

Tav

dbeeby

Hi Tav

I was just wondering if you ever did find out about converting your two flats into one house as we are thinking of doing a similar thing?

Thanks

Dean

hazyjo

dbeeby wrote: »

Hi Tav

I was just wondering if you ever did find out about converting your two flats into one house as we are thinking of doing a similar thing?

Thanks

Dean

Try sending them a PM (click on their name, it'll give you the option to send a PM). Thread's over a year old and they might not have alerts set up.

Jx

klolav

dbeeby wrote: »

Hi Tav

I was just wondering if you ever did find out about converting your two flats into one house as we are thinking of doing a similar thing?

Thanks

Dean

Me too! theres not a lot of info out there! I have PM'd.
Thanks J

bob4co

We are in very similar position...own a maisonette and the garden flat is about to go on the market and would like to make an offer as the 'marriage value' is considerable based on similar houses on the market. Any thoughts on financing or general advice would be much appreciated

By way of background....we have a mortagage on the maisonette (circa 50% loan to value) and bit of cash elsewhere, but would still need a mortage to buy the garden flat...does anyone now of any lenders that are ameniable to lending on the the property as a whole? Or, does it make more sense to remortage to release equity in the upper flat and then aim to get a buy to let for the flat downstairs. Presumably it gets complicated if the lenders are different. Any help/thoughts, very very much appreciated! Thank you.
Bob