Extensions in Coventry, priced in writing before anything starts.
An extension in Coventry starts with two checks that are not needed in most of the towns around the city: whether you are in one of the eighteen conservation areas, and whether one of the fourteen Article 4 directions covers your street. Both change what is permitted, and in a city with that many designations the odds are not negligible.
Where neither applies, and on the interwar and post-war housing out through Coundon, Cheylesmore and Wyken that is usually the case, a single storey rear extension of up to four metres on a detached house or three on a semi can fall within permitted development. Inside a conservation area those figures reduce and a side extension loses its permitted development rights altogether.
The other Coventry specific check is what the house is actually built of. The city has a substantial amount of post-war non-traditional construction, and a house that looks like brick from the pavement is not always brick behind the render. That matters enormously when you want to form an opening in a rear wall, because the structural approach is different and so is the price. We establish the construction type before we design anything into it rather than finding out when the wall is opened.
On the Victorian terraces in Chapelfields and Stoke the constraint is different again: solid walls, shallower foundations than a modern build, and access through the house. All workable, none of it a reason to avoid extending, but all of it a reason to get a price from somebody who has stood in the garden.
Our extensions work is set out in more detail there, including the stages of a build and how the 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 Coventry City 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 Coventry street to the next.
Where a skip has to stand on the road, the licence comes from Coventry City Council rather than from Warwickshire, because Coventry is its own highway authority. On the terraced streets this often coincides with a residents’ parking scheme, so the skip position and the van position both need sorting before the first delivery rather than on the morning.
One route people do not know about is worth raising. A single storey rear extension deeper than the standard limits, up to eight metres on a detached house or six on any other, can sometimes be built under the larger home extension procedure. It is not permission as such, it is a prior approval process: the council notifies your neighbours, they get a chance to object, and the answer comes back inside about six weeks. Where it fits, it turns a full application into a much shorter wait, and we will tell you if your plot is a candidate.
Part of our wider building work in Coventry.
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.
