Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across Solihull and the surrounding area.
Southfield Construction works in Solihull and the villages around it. It is the most tightly controlled borough on our patch for ordinary householder work, and knowing which of three separate constraints applies to your property is the first job. Before anybody draws anything, that is the most useful thing builders in Solihull can do for you.
Extensions, renovations, roofing and groundworks across the borough. We look after the Building Regulations side of the work, arranging the inspections and seeing the job through to sign off, and you get a price in writing before anything starts.
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 Solihull Metropolitan Borough 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.
These are the trades we carry out ourselves. Every one leads to a page describing that work in detail.
Footings, brickwork, roof and full fit out
More about this
Patios, paving, decking, fencing and turf
More about thisSolihull is a borough of large houses on wooded plots, and both halves of that description matter to a builder.
The housing runs from Victorian and Edwardian villas in the older suburbs, through very substantial interwar and post-war detached and semi-detached stock, to modern development at the edges. Much of it was built with space around it, which makes Solihull one of the easier places on our patch to extend a house in physical terms. Side access is normal, driveways are the rule, and plots are generous enough that a machine can reach a back garden.
The trees are the other half. This is a heavily wooded borough and the planting on many plots is mature, protected, and considerably more constraining than the building itself. On a good number of the jobs we look at here, the question is not whether the house will take an extension but whether it can be built without damaging something the council will not let you touch.
Beyond the built up area, most of the undeveloped borough is Green Belt, and the villages, Knowle, Dorridge, Balsall Common, Hampton in Arden, Meriden, Berkswell and Barston, sit within it. Work on a property out there is subject to an entirely different set of policy tests from work on a Shirley semi, and it is a mistake to price the two the same way.
Construction itself is conventional across most of the stock: cavity walls, sound foundations, and buildings that take alteration comfortably. The complications here are almost entirely planning ones rather than structural ones.
Those are the places we work most often, not the limit of where we go. We cover the town and the surrounding West Midlands villages, so if you are not sure whether we reach you, just ask.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Solihull street to the next.
Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council is the local planning authority. It is a metropolitan borough and therefore unitary, so planning, building control and the roads all sit with the same authority. There are 20 conservation areas in the borough.
This is the one to know about, and it is unusually broad. On 30 May 2019 the council authorised an Article 4 Direction removing residential permitted development rights from properties within part of the Olton Conservation Area, with the aim of encouraging alterations that preserve or enhance the area’s historic character. The effect is that planning permission is now required for most householder development there.
Most Article 4 directions are narrow, covering houses in multiple occupation or a specific feature such as windows. This one is not. If your property falls within the affected part of Olton, the working assumption should be that an application is needed for work you would elsewhere simply get on with, and it is worth confirming that with the council before a designer is engaged.
Any tree in a conservation area over 75 millimetres in diameter, measured at 1.5 metres above ground, has automatic protection. No cutting, removal, damage or destruction is permitted without prior notification to the council. That threshold is small, which means a great deal more planting is protected than people assume. Wilful destruction of a protected tree without consent is a criminal offence carrying a maximum fine of £20,000.
Most of the undeveloped borough is Green Belt, where national policy presumes against inappropriate development. Extensions to existing dwellings can be acceptable but are tested against whether they are disproportionate to the original building, and outbuildings and annexes are looked at closely. We establish the Green Belt position before designing anything on a village or rural property.
Permitted development, where it survives, is still not an exemption from Building Regulations. A full plans application is required, and we arrange and meet the inspections that follow and see the work through to sign off.
Solihull is a unitary authority, so the council deciding your planning application is also the highway authority. A skip standing on a public road here is licensed by the same council, applied for by the skip company rather than by you or by us, and it needs to be in before the skip is due.
On most Solihull plots there is a driveway, a side gate and room to work, so a skip stands on your own ground, no licence is needed, and a machine can reach the rear of the property. That takes real cost out of a job compared with a terraced street elsewhere, and we price what the access actually allows rather than applying a standard rate.
What replaces access as the limiting factor here is the planting. Getting a machine down the side of a house is straightforward; getting it there without tracking over a protected root protection area frequently is not. We plan the route as carefully as we plan the work, and where the only sensible route crosses roots we use ground protection or barrow it.
We also work across Kenilworth, Coventry, and Warwick.
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.
