Having seen the Grove Park extension, our local charity-worker client wanted to apply the same principles to her new but tiny Victorian house. Her main ambition was to get far more daylight penetration and achieve an open-plan-living environment. The entire work had to be carried out within about 6 weeks, across Christmas/New Year and all for £25,000!
We knew that we had to have an extremely friendly, hard working and cost-effective builder to succeed. So we introduced a builder we trusted, working closely with him to cost-engineer the scheme. We removed most of the structural walls on the ground floor and inserting large box frames but daily life had to go on for our client! The extension was a tiny infill (2.5m square) into the projecting rear wings of her house and of her neighbour. The whole rear ground floor now became a single space; floor levels also became one, and old Victorian purlins machined sawn to form all the wide, matured floorboards to provide authentic wide, mellow boards to match the rest. A folding sliding oak screen gave access onto a landscaped rear garden; we adapted the old blocked up chimney to take a log-burning stove. The budget was so tight that we reused her kitchen units. The glass fronted wall units were turned through 90 degrees, with added gas piston struts so that the doors upon upwards, and replaced ply backs with glass to make them totally see-through. With LED lights throughout and a large rooflight over the new kitchen the whole space is flooded with light.
