In keeping with the "fine wine" blogger Paul Linford's description of me as doing "interesting minutiae" I just thought I'd blog about building regulations. Yes I know, it's very boring, but as a home owner who has done alterations I never realised quite how anal the rules were about making changes to your own property until I tried to.
Building Regulations change all the time, given that they are all about "minutiae" no one actually pays much attention to them accept perhaps the building industry and the town hall building control department who, so it seems, apply the rules in different ways.
The next set of change will be coming in in just three days time, and will have quite an impact on building cost for new builds and certainly impede the ability of some home owners to make improvements to their property. Specifically if you want to build a loft conversion, which is a very popular way of increasing the value of your property for less cost then buying a property with an extra room, the cost is about to sore by quite a bit.
The new regulation require that any new loft conversions require either a secondary stair well "means of escape" (difficult in a Victorian terrace) or the installation of sprinkler system. Adding a stair well is clearly going to be out of the question for most homes as it will simply cut into already existing living space, so most people will have to go for a sprinkler system.
Sprinkler systems are by no means cheap. They are essentially the addition of central heating piping, and will cost you at the minimum £3000 and if you live in an old property you're looking at a retro fit at which the cost could double.
Just to put that in perspective, a sprinkler system will increase the price of the average loft conversion by about 10%. Apologies for writing about a boring topic, but the way regulations dictate what you can do with your own property does irk me. It all comes down to personal responsibility and risk for me.
7 comments:
Don't knock it - the ability to dig around for good stories in obscure documents is an increasingly rare talent in our sheep-like political media. I was paying you a compliment!
I know it was compliment :)
Do we know what the reasoning is behind this regulation ? Do houses with l;oft conversions go up in flame more often than the ones without ?
Laughably my partner and I are having quotes for a loft conversion. None of them have mentioned sprinkler systems yet. But all the expensively purchased internal doors downstairs have to go and be replaced by crappier fire doors and...heres the laugh....the loft guy said you used to have to put the automatic door closers (springs) on the fire doors so they would close, but because kids kept getting their fingers trapped in them you dont have to. So you put in expensive fire doors and probably keep them open (like your current doors) so whats the fracking point....what another total waste of my money by this governments obsession with pettyfogging regulation (still it keeps some bureacrats employed and voting labour, so its a winner unless you are a taxpayer and viscerally hate NuLab
But what gives those tossers the power to impose such regulations ? Where does it come from ?
I always find it interesting that those kind of things are accepted by the public, as if it was inevitable.
I mean, where does it stop ?
Pascal - Once you've got the commies in, it doesn't stop. How can it? Greater and greater control, over people, over production, over property. The iron fist. Which I see in Britain. The regulators are in control, including the regulators in the education sector, where children of five years of age are being force-fed information about sex by people who, on the outside of the education system, would be investigated for paedophilia.
Verity, I got that.
What I want to know is what gives the authorities (for want of a better word), the power to decide these things ? Is it the case that Parliament can decide anything they want without restrictions in this country ?
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