29 Victoria Road, Bognor Regis: a 50m² rear extension, on site now
Status: in progress. Near completion, not complete. This page will be rewritten as a finished case study on the day the job hands over, at this same address, so anything you bookmark today still works.
We are publishing it now because a job you can go and stand in is worth more than a photograph of one that finished three years ago.
The brief
Fifty square metres of new ground-floor living space at the back of the house, opened right through to the rooms that were already there. Not a room added on the end of the house with a door into it — one ground floor, with the join deliberately invisible once the plaster is on.
That was Kamal's brief, and the heating, the lighting and the floor were in it from the start rather than decisions left until the shell was up. That matters more than it sounds, and it is the reason the specification below reads the way it does.
The property
A house in Bognor Regis with enough garden at the rear to take fifty square metres, and enough room at the side to build a separate boiler room.
That is deliberately all we are going to say about it. There is no published conservation area appraisal for any of Bognor's three conservation areas, so any confident statement about what houses in this town are typically made of would be something we made up. We measured this one instead.
What was awkward
Three things, none of them dramatic, all of them programme.
The knock-through goes into an occupied house. The new shell is a building site with its own front door. The moment you open the old rear wall, the house becomes part of that site — dust, noise, no back wall. So the opening is one of the last structural jobs on the programme rather than one of the first, and it is planned around the household rather than around the bricklayers.
A fibreglass roof is laid wet, in one go. Glass-reinforced plastic roofing is laminated in place and cured in place. It wants a dry deck, a dry day and a continuous run, which means the roof is a weather-dependent item sitting in the middle of a programme that everything else waits on. And the two lantern kerbs have to be formed and set out before the laminate goes over them, because a lantern is not something you cut into a finished GRP roof afterwards without compromising the thing you just paid for.
Underfloor heating under tiles cannot be rushed. The heat goes in below a floor that has to be dead flat and fully bonded, and the system has to be brought up to temperature and cycled before a single tile is laid. Skip that and the grout tells everybody, about six weeks after you have moved back in. It is a fortnight of programme with nothing visible happening, and it belongs in the quotation where the client can see it, not in an apologetic phone call in week fourteen.
Want to look at a job in this state rather than a finished photograph? Call 07470 078236 and we will arrange it with the client. Reply within one working day.
How we are solving it
The same way every job here runs: the sequence is agreed before anyone digs, and the items that hold everything else up are identified in the quotation rather than discovered on site.
The extension was built, roofed and made watertight as a self-contained structure first. The knock-through came afterwards. The floor build-up, the heating and the tiling were treated as one continuous item with a drying period inside it, not as three separate trades queuing at the door. The boiler room was built to the side so that the plant, the controls and the pipework live outside the living space, where they can be serviced without lifting a tiled floor with heating pipes running through it.
James is on site and is the person Kamal rings. There is no contracts manager between the two of them.
Specification
- 50m² single-storey rear extension
- New windows, a new back door, and bifold doors to the garden
- Full knock-through into the existing house
- Underfloor heating beneath a tiled floor, right across the ground floor
- LED lighting throughout, high-end
- A boiler room, built as a separate structure at the side
- Full fibreglass roof
- Two roof lanterns
Duration
Not published — because the job is not finished, and a duration quoted before handover is a guess.
The on-site programme goes into this page the week it completes, alongside the reasons any of it moved. That is more useful to you than a round number today.
Cost
£100,000 + VAT. That is what the contract totals before VAT. Every figure on this page is a before-VAT figure, with VAT charged at 20% on top of it.
Across fifty square metres that works out at £2,000 per square metre + VAT — the bottom of the £2,000 to £3,000 band we publish, on a job with underfloor heating, a fibreglass roof, two lanterns, bifolds and a separate plant building in it. Divide it yourself: that is what the number is there for. The band and what moves a job up it are in what a rear extension costs per square metre.
That figure is the whole thing: foundations, shell, roof, glazing, the knock-through and the structure that made it possible, the tiled floor and the heating under it, the lighting, and a separate building at the side to house the plant. It is not a shell price with the finishes to follow.
Quoted line by line before work started, with the assumptions and the exclusions written down. Payment on fortnightly valuations, 5% deposit, 5% retention released at practical completion. More on how that works in our quotation process.
Result
The honest answer is that there is no result yet, because the job is not done.
There is one thing worth reporting anyway. With the extension still on site — scaffold up, tiles down, snagging ahead of us — Kamal has asked us to quote for a full loft conversion on the same house.
Asking for a price on the next job while the current one is still open is not a review, and it is not a five-star rating. It is a homeowner who has watched us work every day for months and decided to do it again. We would rate that above anything anyone could write on a testimonial page. It is a quotation, not a completed job, and it stays described that way until it is signed.
Where this fits
More on extensions in Bognor Regis, including what Arun District Council's building control service commits to and where permitted development stops locally. The wider service is our house extensions service, and the work we do in Bognor Regis covers the town.
The next phase here, if it goes ahead, would be loft conversions in Bognor Regis. The opening between old and new is steel beams and structural openings.
See everything we have on site right now, or book a free site visit for your own house. Rated 5 stars on Yell, £2m public liability, over 100 projects completed. Finished work is in our previous projects.