LOFT FOR WORDS
Kicking off the story of how we took an old, cluttered loft conversion and transformed it into two double bedrooms, a bathroom and a walk-in wardrobe!
The Backstory to the Loft Conversion
Back when we bought our house in 2019 we knew that aside from the falling down conservatory, the possible damp in the bedrooms, the broken front door (it was sellotaped together for 3 years), the peeling paint on the side of the house hiding the inevitable repointing…aside from all of this, our biggest issue was by far the roof. It was leaking and in dire need of replacement.
We’d also seen the potential to upgrade the existing loft conversion. All that was up there when we first moved in was a double bedroom that was far too hot in summer and beyond freezing in winter – not connected to any central heating. And a huge amount of eaves storage space. Huge. There was purportedly an old bath in the front eaves – a rumour that sadly turned out not to be true but definitely could have been true, nonetheless.
At the time, we just used the loft bedroom as a dumping ground/my discarded projects art space. For three years.
Whenever we opened the stiff Velux window and gazed out over the outrigger, we could feel the potential. We knew we wanted to extend over the back of the house and into the eaves storage. It made sense to do this at the same time as replacing the roof.
It was just a matter of time, coming up with the right design, and getting the funds together. And living with a leaking roof in the meantime.
Maximizing Space: Doubling Our Loft’s Potential
We kicked off the concept stage in 2021. After much toing and froing with an architect, we couldn’t get the design quite right for what we envisaged. Mike sat down one evening and started tinkering around with Powerpoint to come up with a completely new design incorporating what we really wanted. Here was the original footprint…
And here were some initial ideas…
We’d originally thought of having the whole space one large bedroom with an ensuite, for the wow factor. However, we knew that creating another bedroom adds to the value of a house, and we had the space to create two bedrooms and still have plenty of space to play around with.
What we really wanted was space for a master bedroom, with an ensuite and a separate dressing area/”walk in” wardrobe, as well as a spare bedroom/office on the side. Was this too much to try to achieve?
It turns out not, with Mike’s nifty Powerpoint skills! Here is what Mike eventually designed for the space:
Fast forward to 2022 and we were ready to get going with the build and finally replace the roof.
Loft Conversion: All Systems are Go
We decided to find a wrap-around company to help us organise it all seeing as we were (crazily) getting married at the same time. Ridiculous. We went with London-based Visionary Lofts and had Slawek & Marieusz assigned as our builders (they were amazing – more on them later). Once we’d got planning permission done – bit of a backstory and took wayyy longer than we’d anticipated, but sorted – it was all systems go… to be continued.