Before & After Conversions In Cornwall

The four stages

Roughly eight to ten weeks for a dormer conversion, three to five for a garage.

1. 
   01

   Before: a void, not a room

   An unconverted loft is a cold space outside the heated envelope, with ceiling joists sized to hold up plasterboard rather than people. A garage is the same idea at ground level - a slab with no membrane under it, often a single skin of blockwork, and a floor set deliberately below the house so water runs out. Neither is a defect. They are correct for what they were built to do, and completely wrong for a room.

2. 
   02

   During: the part you pay for

   New floor joists sized for a habitable floor, steels in, padstones and spreaders bedded properly. On a Cornish stone wall this is where the surprises live, which is why it happens early. The roof gets opened, made good and re-covered, slates set aside and reused where they are sound. By the end of this stage the space is dry and structurally finished, and it looks worse than when we started.

3. 
   03

   During: insulated and boarded

   Insulation to hit 0.15 W/m²K on the roof and 0.18 on the walls - tighter than the standard a brand new house is held to. Then electrics, plumbing, the staircase, and plasterboard. This is the stage where the room's real dimensions appear, and where people finally believe it is going to work.

4. 
   04

   After: skimmed, ready to decorate

   Plastered, skimmed and handed over clean. The fire doors are in, the alarms are wired to the mains with battery backup, and the escape window meets its 0.33 square metre minimum. Building control has done the final inspection and signed the completion certificate.

What the finished rooms become

The same structural job ends up as very different rooms depending on what the household actually needs.

• 

  A loft room finished as a guest bedroom, with rooflights set into the slope

• 

  A shower room built into the eaves, using the low headroom rather than wasting it

• 

  A children's room, with bunks tucked under the lowest part of the roof

• 

  An integral garage opened through into the main living space

• 

  A converted garage finished as a family room off the hall

• 

  A kitchenette in a self-contained annexe conversion

What customers say

Conversions across mid and north Cornwall, from Victorian terraces in Truro to bungalows on the coast road.

• We had been told twice that our roof pitch was too shallow for a loft. The survey here came back the same, but with an actual option - a rear dormer to buy back the headroom over the stair. They measured 1.9m at the centre of the flight and showed us where that sat against the regs before we spent anything. Two bedrooms and a shower room now.

• Ours is an old miner's terrace and the walls are random rubble, not cavity. They were straight with us that the steel bearings would need opening up before anyone could price it properly, and they got the engineer out first rather than guessing. Cost more than a modern semi would have, but nothing on the quote changed from start to finish.

• We're inside the mining World Heritage Site so a dormer was never going to fly. They knew that on the first visit and steered us to conservation rooflights instead, which kept us out of a planning application altogether. The slate was matched properly too - you cannot tell where the new work stops.

• Integral garage into a snug and a utility. What sold me was that they explained the floor build-up - the damp membrane, the insulation, why the finished floor ends up a couple of inches higher than the hall. Every other quote just said 'convert garage'. Warm room, no condensation, and it was done in under four weeks.

• Terraced house on a hill, so the scaffold had to go on the pavement. They sorted the licence with Cornwall Council and gave us the two-week lead time up front instead of turning up and discovering it. Small thing but it tells you how the rest of the job went.

• A proper annexe for my mum, and honest advice on the bits I would never have thought about - that the council tax discount depends on who lives there, and that a planning condition tying it to the main house would knock out the reduced VAT rate. They flagged it before we committed rather than after.