Wadebridge is where our service area is measured from. Every job we price anywhere in north Cornwall is priced by its distance from this town, which tells you how often we are in it. We have converted lofts above Egloshayle, turned garages into offices off Gonvena Hill, and stood in more Two Trees bungalow roof spaces than we can count.
The town rewards converting. Prices run above the Cornwall average, the housing stock is full of generous mid-century roofs, and the alternative - selling up and buying a bigger house in the same small market - costs multiples of what a conversion does. One team handles your survey, structural design, Cornwall Council building control submission and fit-out, with a written quote that has VAT in it and the exclusions listed.
Tell us what you are thinking and we will come and look at it. No charge, and no obligation to go ahead.
Half an hour, no charge, and a straight answer on whether the space works.
Steels, floors and bearings are our own work, not a subcontractor's problem.
Full Plans submitted to Cornwall Council, completion certificate at the end.
Same people from first survey to final walk-round. Nobody to chase.
Wadebridge exists because of its bridge - the 15th-century crossing locals call the Bridge on Wool - and the town still splits along the river it spans: St Breock parish on the west bank, Egloshayle on the east, with Guineaport running along the water between them. Beyond the older core the housing climbs both valley sides, which is why so many Wadebridge homes come with a view and a sloping garden, and why the estate agents' listings lean so heavily on words like "elevated position".
For conversion work that geography is mostly good news. The hillside stock - Edwardian villas off the St Breock side, the popular detached bungalows at Two Trees, the newer homes at The Cornish Quarter development - sits high, dry and outside the conservation area that covers the historic centre. The streets close to the bridge need a different conversation: they sit inside the 1992 conservation area boundary, and the lowest of them sit within the town's flood defence line too. We know which rules apply to which street, because this is the town we work from.
Three routes to more space, all inside the walls and roof you already own. The right one depends on your house, and in Wadebridge the houses vary street by street.
Wadebridge is bungalow country as much as it is townhouse country, and a bungalow roof is the best conversion candidate there is - big in proportion to the rooms below it. On the Victorian houses near the centre we work around the conservation area rules; on the estates we usually don't have to.
Learn more about loft conversions in Cornwall
Most Wadebridge garages hold a lawnmower and a freezer, not a car. Turning one into a snug, office or utility costs a fraction of extending, and because the town's driveways already satisfy Cornwall Council's parking standard, losing the garage rarely raises a planning eyebrow.
Learn more about garage conversions in Cornwall
With Wadebridge prices sitting above the county average, buying a relative their own place nearby is a stretch for most families. A self-contained annexe in the garage or loft solves it inside the plot you already own - and we explain the council tax and VAT wrinkles before you commit.
Learn more about annexes & granny flats in CornwallEvery town in our patch has its own version of this argument. Wadebridge's version is unusually strong, and it comes down to what the houses are worth, what they are built like, and how little anyone wants to leave.
Wadebridge grew in layers - Victorian and Edwardian townhouses around Molesworth Street and Egloshayle, mid-century bungalows on estates like Two Trees, and new homes still going up at The Cornish Quarter. The middle layer is the sweet spot: simple roofs, decent pitches, no listing to negotiate.
At an average of £372,970 over the last year, Wadebridge sits some £40,000 above the Cornwall-wide figure. When houses carry that sort of value, the difference between two bedrooms and three is real money - usually a good deal more than the conversion costs to build.
People come to Wadebridge for the Camel Trail, the schools and the position between two coasts, and they are reluctant to trade it away for one more room. Converting lets you stay put. Selling up, paying stamp duty and agent fees, and buying bigger in the same town costs far more than a loft.
This is the centre of our patch, not the edge of it. The service area is literally drawn as a circle around Wadebridge. No travel time in the price, quick site visits, and no vanishing act if something needs a second look after handover.
Because most of the town climbs the valley sides above the Camel, the typical Wadebridge loft is dry, well-ventilated and structurally straightforward. The low-lying streets near the bridge need more care - which is exactly the sort of thing a proper survey establishes before anyone quotes.
Being the local firm cuts both ways: we get the work because we are nearby, and we cannot hide if something goes wrong, because we are nearby. The warranty below is backed by the fact that we drive past our Wadebridge jobs every week.
The warranty covers the part we control: the structure. Beams sized and signed off by an engineer, bearings that are capable of taking the load, floors that meet their span, and a roof that stays weathertight where we have opened it up. It is written down and handed over with the building control completion certificate at the end of the job, not promised verbally on the doorstep at the start of it.
It matters more here than it would upcountry. A lot of Cornish walls are random rubble stone rather than cavity brickwork, and Eurocode 6, the masonry design standard, explicitly does not cover rubble masonry. There is no code route for dropping a steel onto a wall like that. It has to be justified by an engineer from first principles, which is exactly why we open up and look before we price, rather than after.
The same seven stages every time, whether the house is a terrace by the bridge or a bungalow on the hill. The sequence exists so the structural questions get answered before the money gets spent.
We measure the head height from the top of the ceiling joist to the underside of the ridge, look at how the roof is built, and work out where a staircase can physically land. On a garage we check the floor level, the damp course and how the walls were built. This is the visit that decides whether the job is worth doing at all, and we would rather tell you no at this stage than three weeks in.
One document, VAT included, with the structural allowance shown as its own line rather than buried. Where a wall has to be opened up before anyone can be certain what the steel is bearing onto, we say so and give you the range. Exclusions are listed. If your quote from someone else has no structural line on it, that cost has not gone away.
We check whether your permitted development rights survive. Dormers are not permitted development on article 2(3) land, which in Cornwall means every conservation area, the National Landscape and all ten areas of the Mining World Heritage Site. Rooflights usually still are. Getting this right at the start is the difference between a four-week start and a four-month one.
Architectural drawings, then a structural engineer sizes the beams and specifies the bearings. We submit Full Plans to Cornwall Council rather than a Building Notice - it costs less in every fee band and it means the details are agreed before anyone cuts anything, instead of being argued about on site.
Scaffold where the work needs it, then the load-bearing stage: new floor joists sized for a habitable floor rather than a storage loft, steels in, padstones and spreaders bedded properly. On older Cornish stone walls this is where surprises live, which is why it happens early and why we look before we price.
Roof made good, dormer or rooflights in, windows glazed. Once the space is dry it is insulation, electrics, plumbing and the stair. Insulation is worth paying attention to here - the limits for a conversion are tighter than for a new-build house, 0.15 on the roof against 0.16, which catches a lot of people out.
Skim, decorate, doors, sockets, flooring. Then the building control final inspection and your completion certificate, the electrical certificate, and the written structural warranty. We walk the room with you before we take the scaffold down, not after.
More of our Wadebridge enquiries start with a bungalow than any other kind of house - and almost none of those callers realised a hip to gable could roughly double their usable roof space.
Anyone weighing up a move here - or wondering why the locals won't leave - should start with these three.
Around 18 miles of level, traffic-free trail along the old railway line, with Wadebridge as its natural mid-point and bike-hire hub. The five-and-a-half mile stretch to Padstow beside the estuary is the most ridden path in Cornwall for good reason.
Learn more about The Camel Trail (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
Built between 1461 and 1475 and known as the Bridge on Wool, after the trade that is said to have paid for it. Seventeen arches originally, thirteen surviving, and still carrying traffic across the Camel five and a half centuries on.
Learn more about The Old Bridge (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
The county's biggest event lands on Wadebridge's doorstep every June - three days, roughly 120,000 visitors, and a showground that has been the Royal Cornwall Show's permanent home since 1960, just west of town on the A39.
Learn more about Royal Cornwall Showground (opens Google Maps in a new tab)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.
Being twenty minutes from our own base, Wadebridge jobs carry no travel premium at all. As a guide: a single garage conversion usually lands between £15,000 and £20,000, a rooflight loft between £30,000 and £45,000, and dormer or hip to gable work between £45,000 and £85,000, all before VAT. The site visit that turns those ranges into a fixed written figure is free.
Our whole patch is drawn as a 25 mile circle with Wadebridge at its centre, so every town below is within practical daily reach of the same team. If your village sits between two of them, so are you.
Half an hour, no charge, and a straight answer on whether your loft or garage is worth converting - including what the conservation area or the flood line means for your street, if either applies. We are closer than you think.
