It’s been a long wait and indeed it’s come right down to the allowable council deadline, but we’ve been given the go ahead. Planning has been approved! Celebrations all round. It’s conditional upon us getting the building materials (bricks / tiles / render / windows) approved, but fundamentally we can move on to the next stage – building regulations. Doubtless more obscene sums of money to be shelled out but it’s all begin to feel a bit more real at last!
November 25th has marked the next major milestone in our planning saga. A back and forth with the architect over the family room roof has yielded a seemingly workable solution.
I’m told the pitched roof will not result in an oddity on the inside ceiling. (Fingers crossed, I’ll only remain truly convinced once it’s built). To avoid faffing around with the upstairs bedroom window we have a ‘characterful’ ‘dip’ in the roof just be the bedroom window.
So this is it. Now the waiting game begins once again. We’ve got a holiday booked over the new-years period and hopefully all being well, we’ll come home to a decision from he council. Fingers crossed!
Wow – this planning malarky is really dragging on much longer than even I expected.
I’ve been on to the builders, the local planning department and the civic society and I think fundamentally we’ve settled on the principals of an extension.
It would seem to make sense to attach a new garage rather than our previous detached suggestion and to extend upstairs above it. This would give us both a decent sized garage and the en-suite to the master bedroom. A “simple” single storey extension can then be tacked on the back of the kitchen to make things a bit bigger and to sort out the utility.
Our Architect concurred the scheme would work, although wasn’t too impressed with my suggested roof lines, preferring instead a gable end which I duely mocked up as well..
This raises the interesting question, of how much separation is required between houses on the 2nd storey? Ideally, the bigger the 2nd storey extension the better for us since it would turn a pokey en-suite into a grand dressing room/bathroom. Further mockups on my part which I’ve emailed to Havering planning, so we’ll see what their views are on the below..
Whilst all this is being contemplated, the ‘simple’ extension to the kitchen is also turning out not to be quite so simple.
Slightly controversially, we’ve decided it would be better to have the doors from the kitchen into the garden on the side wall (facing the dining room) rather than on the rear wall. To try and break up what would be an otherwise featureless end to the kitchen, I’ve proposed putting a matching bay on the back. The above diagram was my naive sketch of how this might work, but the Architect was again not impressed.
I’ve commited another crime against design allegedly with my flat roof over the proposed bay, so the Architect has come back with the above suggestion of a pitched roof to allow the bay to have it’s own roof of it’s own to match that on the back of the dining room.
..only the trouble with this is (and, to be fair with my original design too), is that I don’t think this will actually work inside the house. Having a sloping roof on the extension I think is going to cause havoc with the ceiling heights internally.
We’ve spent the last few days racking our brains over this conundrum, and the only suggestion I’ve managed to come up with so far is the monstrosity below.
I wonder if the bay has to bite the dust and we’ll have to go for a flat back instead. More emails to the architect tomorrow I think unless you, dear reader, have any suggestions? Answers on a postcard please!
Well well well.. another twist and turn in the story of Render..
Whilst perusing rightmove, I came across a local ‘exhibition’ house which has been extended and altered by the new owners. Giving into curiosity, I thought I’d have a look through the original exhibition catalogue to see exactly what they’d done. Flicking past the “Balgores Lane” section – I noticed..
…which seems to suggest the other houses built around the time of ours were all cement roughcast rendered. Indeed some even mention “hollow walls”. I’d always taken it on the value of our original survey that we had solid walls – but now I wonder.
Since all the brickwork is covered with Render, I was suspecting I was going to have to drill a hole to figure out whether we really could have cavity walls. Then I had a moment of inspiration..
Taking a photo of the front wall above the porch seems to suggest that all the bricks are facing the same way. If I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure this means we do in-fact have cavity walls!
So – sounds like cement render is back on the cards – and maybe roughcast rather than smooth? Back to planning then..
The question of exactly how best to re-render the house still remains open, but further research and information is upon us.
Technology at the time in 1911 was to build houses with solid (non-cavity) walls and Oakleigh is certainly no exception. This prevents a problem for rendered buildings with natural moisture becoming trapped in the walls and being unable to escape thus causing and or render problems allegedly.
I’ve discovered a good internet forum which I shall be looking to for matters of advise and discussion over at: http://www.periodproperty.co.uk/forum/index.php
Turn of the century solid wall properties evidently present somewhat of a quandary since some were supposedly designed to take a cement based render whereas other and all earlier buildings would require a breathable ‘lime’ based render.
In true ‘Homes under the Hammer Style’ – lets call in the experts…
Google had yielded the existance to me of ‘Insulated Render’.
This seems on paper like a reasonable solution for a number of reasons. The various layers are designed to prevent any water ingress hence removing the problem of internal damp. It’s also a neat way to dramatically increase the u value of our walls and to hence potentially lower our heating bills.
So – the first folk we got round were insulated render specialists. “Insulated render is exactly what you need Sir, nothing else will work… It will cure all your problems” went the sales pitch. Sadly with the ensuing quote, the company was also trying to clear third world debt or double it depending on which side of the fence you’re looking. Suffice to say, we won’t be going the insulated render route. A consideration of an insulated solution is that the insulation adds 150mm thickness to the walls. For us, this which would also mean having to faff around with the windows, cills, corbels, bits of the roof – so even cost aside, I don think this would fly.
Next up, was the regular high street render company. “Oh no Sir, a regular cement based render is all you need. We use a waterproof and breathable additive which means you wont have any problems with damp…” went the sales pitch. The resultant quote was much more in line with our expectations.
But the good folk over at www.periodproperty.co.uk had been extolling the virtues of Lime, so the final expert in the line up so far was a lime render specialist.
“..Oh no sir, a cement render would never work. You will always have the same problem. You must have a lime finish..” went the sales pitch. I’m beginning to spot a theme here. That said, I was thoroughly impressed with the lime guy. He made several suggestions including removing the render from below our slate DPC to leave exposed brick to prevent any damp bridging across it. I was also interested to learn that like a cement based render, lime can also be roughcast or smooth. His quote came in around 20% more than the cement guys, so I think is probably our favourite candidate at the moment.
More I’m sure will follow in the coming months..
One issue with the house which was immediately apparent when we originally looked round it was that there was a problem with the external rendering. Knowing nothing at all about rendering, it came as quite a shock when the surveyor advised it all had to come off and be completely be redone since the previous owners had only had the house re-rendered themselves a few years prior. Evidently the wrong type of render had been applied. Indeed it’s questionable whether it was even render that was applied at all or if it was just wet sand!
Still, to our unknowledgable selves, this poses the fundamental question of what is the correct type of render? So much have we thought about and researched this question, I’m sure it will come up in future blog posts, so I shall just refer to it as the “R” question. It also opens up a whole different can of worms for us in thinking about the order in which we do various work that’s needed. The former garage which has been poorly converted into a study needs to be structurally changed and we’d quite like to do a small extension – both of which would make sense to complete before undertaking a re-rendering.
Even the “R” question aside, there’s one issue for debate.
The current finish on the house is a smooth render which has cracked and discoloured in places which leads me to yet a further question of does a smooth finished render ever look good for more than a year or so? ..and if we’re going to have to rerender the whole place, should we take this opportunity to perhaps opt for an alternative finish?
Trawling the interwebs, we came across this picture of Oakleigh from the 1970s:
..which clearly shows the house formerly had a smooth rendered finish, although whether this in-turn was also not the original finish, who knows.
I’m not convinced that removing the render and just leaving the house as brick is an option, so I think we’re faced with the following 3 options:
In our street, there are 4 of our house. 2 Have been pebbledashed and painted, 1 has fancy roughcast.
I actually personally like the roughcast/painted pebbledash finish, but keeping the house smooth would seem to be more sympathetic maybe to it’s architecture?! Oh the decisions! Comments and suggestions most welcome!