When we moved in we knew the house - a 1930s Metropolitan semi-detached 3.5 bed house in Amersham - was the right sort of house in the right sort of area. We also knew that it would need quite a bit of work doing before it would become the house we actually wanted.
This "bit of work" varied from updating the rather, er, dated tiles in the bathrooms to the need to create a much bigger kitchen and probably make some more bedroom space in the process.
So, we spent a year living in the house, trying to identify all the things we'd actually want to change about it. The places where we needed more room, the blind corners where we kept bumping in to each other, the dark and pokey crevices which didn't suit the house and so on.
It had already been knocked about twice before - the first time about 25 years ago when the integral garage was converted into a too-small-to-be-useful dining room with an odd inner hallway behind it and the second time about 20 years ago when about 8 feet were added at ground floor level to the side of the garage and inner hallway, creating a longer, more usable room and enabling a downstairs cloakroom to be stuck on the side of the peculiar inner hallway. This inner hallway has no windows and 3 doors coming off it, in the space of about 6ft square. It seems to be a magical place where stuff just accumulates so that you trip over it and means we basically need a light on in there constantly.
That's the downstairs cloakroom in the picture, big enough for a shower cubicle and - to our eyes - blighted by some rather, er, striking chocolate brown tiles (with pink and silver detail). While I'm alarmed to say that you do eventually get used to the tiles (and the creamy brown with orange and chocolate flower patterned tiles in the main bathroom upstairs) this is nothing compared to the shock I had when I saw that Lawrence Lewellyn Bowen was trying to convince us to use the same styles again in his current range of wallpapers!
Then, we did some sketches of how we though the house should work, which walls should come down, which new walls were needed and so on.
Of course, you need someone to help you get planning permission and building regulations signoff for the work, so around a year ago, we contacted an architect who had come recommended. In retrospect we'd have done this differently. We figured we wanted the work to start in spring 2007 so we allowed plenty of time, because we're not the most organised of people and we weren't sure if we'd be able to respond to things as quickly as we might need to.
We gave him a pretty tight scope - that we mostly just wanted our sketches formalising and laying out the key things we wanted to achieve with our extension (ie what we had learned from the year in the house). The architect wasted a lot of our time (and money, probably) coming up with a whole load of suggestions of how we could do it differently which seemed to ignore our requirements, but we overcame this quickly enough and agreed on a draft plan. All plain sailing from there then, right?
Oh, ah. Then came the fun of actually getting the plans tight enough to get through planning approval (which was where we thought we came in anyway). We'd get a set of plans and we'd list a dozen changes. We'd wait a week or so for an update only to find that he'd not dealt with half of the corrections we'd listed. So back we'd go and wait again.
It took us 5 months to get ready to submit our planning application. Ho hum. Then the real fun started; it turned out that we needed an accessibility and environmental statement about our project to be provided by our experienced, recommended architect. He'd never done one of these before - although we forgave him that because they were quite a recent idea. What was less forgivable was our discovery that our experienced, recommended architect seemed to be not the most literate person around. The first statement he produced was quite embarrasing and the second version was little better although it did get approved.
The worst part of this phase was finding out that there were still people around who didn't do their own typing. Watching the days turn to weeks for each draft as he hand wrote each statement, then faxed it to his typist who would get round to it when she was able, then for it to be posted back to him so he could (fail to properly) proof read it for basic typos was utterly painful.
But we got there. No objections. Not even any comments. Job done then!
Eh? Oh. Building Regulations, how silly of us to forget.
Building regs is the bit where someone with an expensive qualification does a series of largely indecypherable calculations to prove that your house won't turn in to an embarrasingly expensive pile of rubble immediately after it's built. We sort of had this expectation that this would entail the Structural Engineer actually coming to look at the house, but no. Evidently such things are perfectly possible without needing to see the structure you are engineering the extension in to. Let's hope we're a fairly conventional building, shall we.
Anway, it must have worked, because when we got around to submitting our plans for Building Regulations all the calculations were fine, the only errors were apparently our architect attempting to fit 160mm of insulating material into a cavity only 120mm deep (I didn't realise he specialised in drawing TARDISs) and the scandalous fact that he forgot to put an extractor fan in the WC (clearly even the council have heard about the lethal nature of my bowel).
So, there we were, all set for the big dig. Which, unless I'm very much mistaken, is where we began.
