Snowley Park has 73 units, all for private sale, ranging in size from two-bedroom terraced units selling for £50 000 through to detached three and four-bedroom houses. At the upper end of their price range, there are 11 homes known as Giddings which have been designed with loft conversions in mind. The Gidding has two floorplan variants and each can be configured to include a third storey.
Potential buyers of an AB Homes Gidding are faced with three choices outlined in the table.
The fully converted loft provides an additional 38 m2 of living space, consisting of two rooms opening off each side of a central staircase. The cheaper option is to go for an open loftspace which adds £5 000 to the selling price of the basic house but enables owners to build into the loft in the future.
The superstructure of the three variants is identical below first floor lintel level and AB Homes is happy to leave the decision on how the loftspace should be finished until the work is well under way.
To upgrade a Gidding to Open Loftspace status, AB makes four specific changes to the specification:
- Roof trusses are changed from the normal closed fink style to open attic trusses. There are also some double trusses placed in the roof to facilitate the placing of a staircase - it is always imperative that trussed roofs shouldn’t be altered once in place. This adds around £800 to the costs, and there is the added cost of hiring a crane to get the trusses up onto the roof.
- Roof shape is changed from hips to gables to get usable space inside the loft. There are some savings on roofing costs in using a gable design but these are more than offset by the added cost of having to build two gable walls. “Building gable walls is a slow painstaking business,” says Andy Allen. “It seems to add an extra week for the brickies.” All in all, this switch costs around £1800.
- At first floor level, the window lintels need to be upgraded in order to take the extra load - this adds £80 to costs.
- Ridge needs to be ventilated - adding £200 to costs.
The total bill for the upgrade is £2880, leaving the housebuilder £2120 profit.
Internally, there are no discernible differences between the basic Gidding and the open loftspace version. Anyone buying the latter would be responsible for putting in a staircase and fireproofing the existing house to conform with Building Regulations. In the loft, they would have to install rooflights and all the insulation and partitioning, as well as upgrading the electrics and the plumbing. The houses all have mains pressure hot water systems, so moving tanks in the loft is not an issue. And the whole site has been designed with 45° roof pitches which creates more usable loftspace on small footprint designs.
The loft options offered by AB are proving popular. Most of the development is being pre-sold and, of the ten loft-option houses either completed or still being built, only two have been built with a hipped roof. Six have been built out and sold with fully converted loftspace while two more have been bought with unconverted open loftspace. The last one has yet to be started. Andy Allen says: “It is not really a large enough sample to tell quite how successful an experiment it has been, but it is certainly giving us a notable sales edge in what is a very competitive market around Peterborough.”
Source
Building Homes
