At the end of last year, our downstairs neighbours extended their property into their garden. The suggestion arose that we could extend our balcony on top of it. Fortunately, they were very understanding when we proposed this in detail, and added in an extra steel beam to be able for us to do so as a future phase with relatively minimal impact to them. Huzzah, I thought. The planning permission process ensued and took longer than strictly necessary as notice had to be given twice, or maybe even thrice, due to omissions. There was some general sucking of teeth that balcony extensions are notorious for not getting approved, but fortunately our plan didn’t give us any more ability to snoop on neighbours (than we already had) or block light from anyone who needed it. So that was ticked off, with lots of help from Jorge at Projection Architects.
Surely now it was easy? In fact, not really. I’ve never had to involve myself in the party wall consent process before, and it’s surprisingly fiddly. The theory is simple enough – you get a surveyor to send letters to affected neighbours (i.e. those adjoining the parts of your property where you’re intending to make changes), if they have any concerns there’s a process for doing additional work (at the constructor’s expense), and if they don’t have any concerns, they just sign the form and off you go.
But this assumes they respond. One neighbour required a bit of hand-holding due to their being multiple stakeholders involved (the leasehold owner does not reside in the property), but that was all fine. However the freeholder simply never responded! The surveyor sent letters, I sent emails, I sent letters, nada, zip, zilch. I hadn’t realised that there is in fact a way to unilaterally end this limbo situation – the surveyor appoints a separate surveyor to act on behalf of the relevant party, and that’s that. I could have saved a month if I’d understood that earlier!
This done, it was now just a matter of finding a builder. I’d assumed I would use the guys who did the downstairs part, but in fact they weren’t as competitive on price as the local recommendation I had, who could even start pretty much straightaway. So after swallowing the significant price tag (questioning whether it actually represented sufficient incremental value to the property when we would come to resell it), off we go.
Below are photos of the start state. Future updates will indicate progress.
Timsformational 