The precedent is set on our street, so I’m thinking of turning the currently unused portion of the loft in our Victorian semi into an office, as me/Mrs K work at home 3 out of 5 days a week.

My requirements are

Desk/chair/electrics

Nespresso machine/biscuit tin

Heating

Opening window.

What else do I need to consider and approximately how much might this cost?

Given this….

The precedent is set on our street,

Then you might get better and more accurate advice / costings  / recommendations  from your neighbours than you’ll get here.

In general terms, you’ll need a design, planning permission, a building warrant, a builder,  somewhere to put a stair and about £20K or thereabouts

Have a good think about where the stairs will go..i’ve seen loads of ‘nice’ loft conversions, with teh stairs as a daft afterthought…

DrP

My brother had a loft conversion done a couple of years ago.
Similar to you, it seemed like there was a precedent for it down their road as the cost of moving to a house with another bedroom is much higher than adding one in the loft.

They ended up with a master bedroom up there – virtually the entire loft space with a decent sized en-suite. It is a really nice sized room.
He converted the original third bedroom (small box room) into his office – he works from home.

I think it cost them £50k including the en-suite, but not the decorating of the bedroom.

Dormer or velux on a sloping roof.

bathroom/toilet – you want it as an office someone else may see it as a bedroom and it will help when you come to sell.

as drP said – where the stairs go.

One office each or a shared one?

is there a watertank there – you may end up switching to a combi boiler and doing a lot of plumbing work.

building regs for insulation etc.

or when you say ‘unused’ do you mean there’s already a loft conversion there?

We just had our done (sat in it as we speak).

Our house is a Victorian terrace. just using Velux windows (2 big ones in the room, one over the stairs)(ie no dormer) we have managed to fit in a very good sized double room, with proper stairs. A local company did it and I think it came in at £23k + decorating. Took 7 weeks to complete.

No need planning permission in this case. Building regs all sorted by the loft conversion company.

The cost depends on what you want to achieve – you could make it into a room with relatively little cost but if you want to be able to sell the house and be legally allowed to call it a room (rather than ‘loft space’) then you will need to ensure everything is built to current regs (ie, full size staircase, fire doors, fire escape* etc).

*The Fire escape simply needs to be an accessible window low enough to climb out of.

Building regs all sorted by the loft conversion company.

Protected means of escape etc.
Was it inspected? I rarely get fussed about planning/regs on here with some of peoples development suggestions but i always
feel loft conversions are a priority when it comes to regs.
Also regarding the planning surely there was some input on where you could put your velux windows?

We did ours last year, turned into a right epic, with pretty much every potential added cost on the list and a few more besides.

That said….

It’s transformed the place, put a big master bedroom with a decent sized ensuite in, can’t see us needing to move any time soon now.

My advice would be to ‘go big or go home’ if you’re going to be putting stairs in and going through all the other faff, you may as well get the biggest possible space you can get out of the process, it will come back around when you come to sell.

I wasn’t involved in what was inspected, the company looked after it all. I think it was the usual stuff though such as standing height over stairs, structural reinforcements, escape routes etc etc.

As mentioned above, all this is vital if you want to claim it is a habitable room.

Planning permission isn’t needed if you aren’t altering the roof profile and the space is under a certain size (under permitted development). Plenty of details online about this.

Had two, one in a modern house which we installed, and one in out current Victorian house which we did not. I would definitely add at least one Dormer window. The increase in useable space cannot be over-stated. And it’s a nice place for a desk. Always add it to the back/side of the house.

What’s the pitch on the roof? If it’s too low, you will be left with a narrow corridoor you can walk down. This wasn’t a huge issue in the first house as we added two Dormers to the rear and it was a kids playroom. (we also added a bathroom for saleability). We started a trend, as four other houses used the same company and design after ours. We had a nice long landing and the stairs went in seamlessly.

Another Victorian house in out road (which we originally planned to buy) put a conversion in by raising the entire roof by four courses and adding a Dormer. As I said, pitch matters for useable space.

Ours saw little change from £50K, but was a really nice space. The current house looks cheap by comparison, but has an over-extension loft room too.

Think carefully about adding an en suite – YOU might want it as an office, but a BUYER may be wanting a bedroom. Our buyer wanted a self-contained loft annexe, which is what we built rather than a playroom.

how friendly are you with your neighbours and/or how shy are you?

We have gone out sideways on ours about ten years ago and out back two years ago.

When we went out sideways we walked around the local area looking for houses similar to ours that had extensions and went and knocked on the doors.

Some people were friendly and loved inviting us in for a look around to get ideas, others didn’t.

We got a good idea of what worked and what didn’t.

IME architects are no good at making suggestions. Builders are much better at telling you what can and can’t be done, what is popular and what can/cant be achieved.

Always add it to the back/side of the house.

I think you have to unless you get full planning which is likely to be rejected I believe.

Think carefully about adding an en suite – YOU might want it as an office

At our last place the ‘office’ in the loft room had the plumbing installed for an en-suite but we stopped short of putting anything in as the whole conversion was only ever used for occasional overnight guests and we got more use out of it as an office on a more regular basis. When we came to sell it, we simply pointed out that it would be a very simple change if the owner wanted to change it.

@kryton57, where in the UK are you?

Another Victorian house in out road (which we originally planned to buy) put a conversion in by raising the entire roof by four courses and adding a Dormer. As I said, pitch matters for useable space.

We’d have to do this as there isn’t enough headroom in our attic…..

+1 for put a dormer in, it gives you so much more livable space, we went to the absolute limits of what was allowed under permitted development and were surprised at how big a dormer we were allowed.

The size was important as thanks to keeping within PD limits our house is not officially listed as having been extended so if we want to go down that route in the future it should be much easier.

@saxonrider north north London around M25 junction 25…?

Ours is a Victorian end terrace and we luckily had about 3-4 foot of brick knee wall which really helped us maximise the space (we put in two kids bedrooms and a separate bathroom). Bear in mind that along with all the insulation and stairwell regs we also had to replace all the doors in the house (bar the lower bathroom) with fireproof units with an intumescent seal and install mains fire alarms. We used the same builder who had done several conversions in the area and I echo the idea that this is more useful than an architect.
Also agree that having the infrastructure installed to ease the conversion into a bedroom with en suite would help if selling is ever on your agenda.
Is your current heating system up to the job of pushing water higher up as well?