… and the not so good news

Well, we’ve hit our Grand Designs ad break moment and the – what’s going to happen next question. It’s all to do with the roof.

Our planning application had the extension roof height at 4.2m. The Building Regs, which flesh out the plans in more detailed and have also been signed off by the local council, set the roof angle at 29 degrees to come in at that height. Separately, because we are grade II listed and in a conservation area, we have a number of planning conditions. One is that we have to use hand made clay tiles for the roof. The minimum angle these can be laid on a roof is 35 degrees.

So we are between a rock and a hard place with requirements agreed by the Council that are contradictory. We researched our options and drew on central government guidance to understand what we had to do.

The advice is to make a non-material amendment and the guys handling our planning said this would normally take around four weeks. However, we’re a listed building, so the Council planning team confirmed we would need to complete a full listed building application as well as a NMA which would take at least six weeks. All this to get the roof height raised by 300mm!

We could proceed at risk and hope the Council never check. If they did follow up, however, we could be asked to make a retrospective application or, even worse, take the roof off and rebuild it. This was a real dilemma as it meant stopping work while we went back through the planning process as the roof is the next thing to be done.

After a few days of talking to builder Ken, our structural engineer and the local planning department we have decided to do this properly and get the necessary permissions to increase the roof pitch to 35 degrees. Ken has been great given he only does one job at a time. Thankfully he was able to bring another job forward so they finished off the walls, tidied up and left the site. They did put in two roof supports at 35 degrees to build the gable ends, hopefully they won’t have to redo them!

The application went in last week and we wait to hear.

Initially we were very disappointed. Everything had been going so well. Now we see this as an opportunity to use the time to plan for the detailed finishing touches, not least our new kitchen.

We have resigned ourselves to the fact that we won’t have our new kitchen until next year and, although this is a long way off, planning the detail now means we can get the infrastructure right for when it is installed.

For a while we’ve been working on an industrial look inspired by a local café and finding an old metal cabinet in a reclamation yard. Looking at design ideas and kitchen options it seems that’s now very ‘on trend’ although we feel we got their first!

We’ve been looking for the right lighting to express this style. It may seem odd thinking about that now but it’s quite key in terms of the wiring and also ensuring there’s a strong fixing if we do go for something reclaimed from an old factory or warehouse, which is one of the options.

We found a couple of great places in Bristol and we stopped off at both on our way to Wales last weekend. First an amazing place that restores fifties English Rose kitchens made by the company that manufactured Spitfires and Lancaster Bombers during the Second World War. After the war they were left with a surplus of aluminium, a factory and a workforce and began making modular, fitted kitchens instead. Source is the place to go and they also do amazing lights with a very entertaining owner who has been in the business for decades and knows the source of every item he has to offer.

The other treasure trove was Robert Mills one of the largest and oldest suppliers of original architectural antiques in the UK. We discovered this in Reclaim, a magazine I’d never come across before and which is a mine of information and ideas on using reclaimed materials in decorating your home.

Now we feel we have too much to choose from and don’t know how we’ll ever make a decision. We’re relieved that the deadline has been postponed for a bit!