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You've got a side return doing nothing and you want to build into it. What you don't want is the disruption, the steels, and the cost of pulling out the wall between the new space and your kitchen. So the question is whether you can just fill the alley in and leave the house as it is. We build home extensions across Northamptonshire, and this comes up more often than you'd think. Here's the honest answer: yes, you can. But there are good reasons most people don't, and the m

The conservatory is unusable. Freezing from October to April, unbearable in July, and it's quietly become the place the bikes and the drying rack live. You want a proper room there instead. We build home extensions across Northamptonshire and this is one of the most common projects we're asked about. Here's what replacing a conservatory with an extension actually involves: the planning position, the cost, the reason the old foundations almost never work, and how the build r

Most kitchen extensions get planned in the wrong order. The extension gets designed, planning goes in, the walls go up, and only then does anyone start thinking about where the sink goes. By which point the drainage is in the wrong place and the only wall long enough for the run of units has a window in it. We design and build extensions and fit kitchens across Northamptonshire, which means we see both halves of this job. Here's how to plan a kitchen extension so the buildi

You want a modest extension. A kitchen a few metres deeper, a utility room, a downstairs cloakroom. Nothing that would trouble Grand Designs. And you're wondering whether you really need to pay an architect to draw it. Most articles answering this question are written by architects. We're a design and build team working across Northamptonshire, so we've got no particular stake in the answer. Here's the honest version: what an architect gives you, when it's worth it on a sma

You've got an architect or designer, you've got a builder, and now someone has mentioned a structural engineer. Another professional, another fee, and it isn't obvious what they add that the other two don't. We design and build extensions across Northamptonshire, and this question comes up on most projects. Here's a straight answer: what a structural engineer actually does, when you legally need one, what they cost, and the rare cases where you can skip it. Do I need a st

Foundations are the part of an extension nobody sees and everybody underestimates. They're also where budgets get blown, because you don't know how deep you're going until the digger is in the ground. We build single storey extensions in Kettering and across Northamptonshire, and foundation depth is the number one source of cost variation on a quote. Here's how the depth is actually determined, what pushes it deeper, and what it costs. What depth do foundations need to be