Room at the Top

It’s done, already, and I’m sitting here with what feels like a different house. An extremely dusty house!.

Only 4 weeks ago I came across a loft conversion company and it’s now done, seriously. Bar the decorations and furniture, we have a whole new room at the top of our house, with en-suite bathroom. I thought about blogging the stages as we went but its gone by so fast that wasn’t going to happen, luckily I captured it all in pictures! As did they on Facebook!

A loft conversion has always been our plan for project numero uno since buying our 1930s semi detached house in Leeds last November. The house came with a loft conversion of sorts, that was basically a poorly done loft conversion, no heating, little headroom and an awkward shape with stairs in the middle of the room, however it did make a useful and massive cupboard!

After being messed around for months with several builders who either decided it was too complicated, or risky, out of the blue I found a team that had finished early on their current job and were happy to squeeze us in a week later and they did so in 3 weeks flat. No concerns, they just cracked on. I’ve worked in the building industry for 9 years and never come across such an organised bunch. They do this day in day out, one loft after another, month by month, so they have their set standards which they follow so they know exactly what they need and have a dedicated team which means you’re rarely waiting for the plumber/electrician to come, they just follow job to job.

Drawings were thrown together by me, but fortunately (or unfortunately) there weren’t too many options on how this could be done, the stairs would follow the existing stairs, raising the hipped roof to a gable end, creating one large bedroom space with en suite. A rear dormer allowed us to put in a bathroom which went above our existing bathroom to make the plumbing simple and we just made it as big as possible.

The stairs to the original loft went through one of the bedrooms so these were taken out leaving us with a much bigger second bedroom. Bonus.

I’ve done over 100 extensions, but I’ve never been involved in a loft conversion, nor carried out any work on my own home. And despite having done it for others its a whole different game when its your own. It was a fast learning curve, with the speed of the job it was decisions as we went and quick decisions at that. What toilet, shower, sink, lights, plugs, radiators, carpet, tiled and paint. The last three still very much outstanding!

The costs as with any build tend to be a little more than anticipated, not the conversion, that was a fixed price and they stuck to it, but of course as the work progress you realise whilst they are here they could replace that radiator wed been meaning to change, the standard handles they give you are not to your liking so suddenly you need 7 new sets of door handles to match. A single Pendant light is included, but spotlights would be nice. 2 plug sockets are included but being such a big space and having not decided where the bed should go a few more sockets would be useful, , ooh especially those usb ones…and so on.

The bulk is done, now just for the nitty gritty final decisions and decorations.

Here are some before and during shots.