Extensions in Wellingborough, priced in writing before anything starts.
An extension in Wellingborough should start with the ground rather than with the drawing, and that is not a general platitude, it is specific to a town sitting in a river valley.
How close a plot is to the Nene, and how low it sits, affects the water table, the bearing capacity and the drainage options, and it varies more across this town than across most. The check is a trial hole plus the Environment Agency flood map for the address, both of which are cheap and quick. We are not going to tell you your garden is wet or your plot floods, because nobody can say that from the pavement. We are going to say that the answers are easy to obtain and expensive to guess at.
Where flood risk applies to a site it can influence floor levels and construction, which is another reason it belongs at the start rather than after a design has been paid for.
The planning position is otherwise ordinary. On the interwar, post-war and modern housing a single storey rear extension of up to four metres on a detached house or three on a semi can fall within permitted development, and the larger home extension route allows up to eight metres or six by prior approval. In any of the ten conservation areas those limits reduce and a side extension loses its permitted development rights entirely.
Our extensions work is set out in more detail there, including the stages of a build and how the Building Control inspections fit around them.
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 North 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 extensions page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Wellingborough street to the next.
Where a skip stands on the road it is licensed by North Northamptonshire Council, which is also the authority deciding your application. On the modern estates a driveway removes the need entirely.
On lower lying plots we allow for the possibility of pumping an excavation and for concrete needing to go in promptly. That is in the price rather than being a reason for a variation later.
Two storey work needs permission far more often than people expect. If we think an application will struggle we say so at the quotation stage rather than taking your money to find out.
Part of our wider building work in Wellingborough.
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.
