Loft Conversions in Northampton, priced in writing before anything starts.
The first question on a Northampton loft is head height, and in the terraced quarter the answer varies more than you would expect from the outside.
These houses were built to a budget, but they were built tall for their footprint, and some of them have better roof space than their frontage suggests. Others have almost none. We measure at the quotation rather than guessing, because the difference between two metres along the walking line and a metre and three quarters is the difference between a room and an expensive storage cupboard.
Where the height is there, the older roofs are cut, with rafters and purlins that can be opened up and strengthened. The purlins are the members doing the real work, and where a previous owner has cut one for a hatch or a tank the roof has been quietly weakened. That gets found at the survey.
Out on the estates the roofs are trussed, which means the structure gets reworked rather than strengthened. Routine work, and not the same job or the same price as a cut roof.
The permitted development volume allowance is forty cubic metres on a terrace and fifty on a semi or detached house. A dormer facing the road is not permitted development anywhere, and in the Boot and Shoe Quarter, where the roofscape of the terraces and the factories reads as one thing, anything visible from the street will be examined closely. Our loft conversion page goes through the structural options.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the West Northamptonshire Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our loft conversions page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Northampton street to the next.
On a terrace, where new floor beams bear onto a wall shared with a neighbour, the work is notifiable under the Party Wall Act and the notice has to be served properly before anything starts. In these streets that applies to most conversions rather than a few, and the notice periods are fixed.
Steels that will not go up the stairs come in through the roof, needing a lift and a part day road closure. Where the plot has a rear entry there is sometimes another way in entirely, which is worth checking before assuming the expensive option.
Escape, fire separation and stair position are all Building Regulations matters and all easier to solve on paper than after the joists are down.
Part of our wider building work in Northampton.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
