Planning

When anyone wants to extend their property the local authority notifies the neighbours when the application is received. Not that for most, permission is required.

We've had two recently, one for across the road in January, this one hasn't been started yet and one for the house at the back of ours on 9th March, this build is nearly completed!
We haven't a problem with either.

All the houses on our road are similar semis, each with an extended kitchen. The usual subsequent extension as was ours a while back, is to extend the lounge out as far as the kitchen or futher, but if ours were longer, it would make the near end quite dark.
Ideally as we did, you get your neighbour to have it done at the same time. This means you can extend the party wall to form the wall for both extensions.
This way, neither look like an extension.



Sometimes neighbours don't agree. Even if you don't want an extension, it's best to agree to have the neighbour's extension side wall on the party line. This means should you later want to have the same extension, with a prior legal agreement, you can tie in to that wall. It also makes a selling point if you decide to move, with such an agreement in place. There are pairs of semis in our road where this hasn't happened, extensions have been built at different times and each extension has its own side wall, each one thus losing over a foot in room width.

This seems to have happened with the people behind us. They had a conservatory built on the back of their house about eight years ago. This has been demolished and this is what they are having (on the right).




They aren't gaining much more room than they had with the conservatory. The extension just seems like it's tacked on to what was already there.
When we had ours done, we had an RSJ put above the ceiling where the old French windows had been at the back of the existing lounge. The whole of the back wall of the house had to be supported on Acro props while this was fitted.
So we had no remaining side wall obstructions in a 22ft long room.

Our "seamless" extension starts at about the middle of that beach landscape painting.



What other people do is their own business, but I'm often amazed at their choices.

We've never consider having a conservatory, we've friends who have a big one on the back of their house. Their's is North facing, as is the house behind ours. They rarely use it as it's too hot in the summer and quite cold in the winter even with a couple of space heaters in it.