Bathroom
renovation
in Chalfont St Giles, HP8

Two items on the government's list of work that may need approval are plainly bathroom ones: putting in a bathroom that involves plumbing, and altering electrics near a bath or shower. Swapping baths, toilets, basins and sinks on their own generally falls outside it.

Approved Document P treats any addition to, or alteration of, circuits in a special location as notifiable. In a room with a bath or shower, that zone is measured around the tap or shower head: up from the finished floor to 2.25 metres, and out 0.6 metres from the edge of the bath tub or shower tray.

Adding radiators to a heating system, and installing or replacing the system itself, are on the same list of work that may need approval.

Our London team takes bathrooms in Chalfont St Giles from survey to handover: structural engineers, designers and architects on our own staff, working with Hampstead Chartered Surveyors & Building Consultancy and based at the Finchley Road studio in Hampstead, NW3. If planning or listed building consent is needed, the decision is Buckinghamshire Council's. Inspections come from Buckinghamshire Council's building control service or from a private-sector approver registered for building control, and where a member of a competent person scheme fits the electrics or plumbing you need not apply for that part yourself.

Sources: GOV.UK: Building regulations approval - when you need approval; GOV.UK: Building regulations approval (printable guide); GOV.UK: Approved Document P: Electrical safety - dwellings, 2013 edition

An upstairs bathroom needs its waste to fall to a stack and the stack to reach the drain. We locate the existing stack, read which way the joists run, and test whether a new stack can rise inside the house before considering one outside.

Outside, the conservation area at the village centre is article 2(3) land, and there the householder right to fit a soil and vent pipe stops short of any wall or roof slope that fronts a highway and forms the house's principal or side elevation.

Cutting a joist or beam for a pipe can damage historic fabric. Works to a listed building can require listed building consent, and the High Street entries in the parish's 2017 schedule include The Green Cottage with The Wellington Cottage, and Ye Olde Shoppe, both Grade II.

If the new room needs daylight, a roof light can come under the householder rules for roof alterations so long as it stands no more than 0.15 metres proud of the original slope; in the conservation area, any window change that does need consent is weighed under Policy CA1.

On the Jordans village estate, an en suite may also need the estate company's approval, because its Management Scheme reaches alterations to properties there, privately owned ones included.

Sources: legislation.gov.uk: GPDO 2015 (SI 2015/596), Schedule 1 Part 1, Article 2(3) land (latest available revised); legislation.gov.uk: GPDO 2015 (SI 2015/596), Schedule 2 Part 1, development within the curtilage of a dwellinghouse (latest available revised); GOV.UK (Planning Practice Guidance): When is permission required?; Chalfont St Giles Parish Council: Neighbourhood Plan for Chalfont St Giles Parish 2014-2036; GOV.UK (MHCLG): Permitted development rights for householders: technical guidance (September 2019); Chiltern District Council: Chiltern District Local Plan, adopted 1 September 1997 (alterations 29 May 2001; consolidated September 2007 and November 2011)

In Approved Document F's table a bathroom needs 15 l/s of intermittent extract. A refit keeps or replaces any fan already there, need not add a ventilation system where none existed, and calls for more ventilation only if the work would leave the room worse against the requirements than before.

A combustion appliance installed in a bathroom during building work, a gas water heater for instance, brings Part J of the regulations into consideration as well.

On a ground floor near the river the flood history matters. The Misbourne flooded the High Street in 2001, and in March and April 2014 groundwater flooding occurred near the telephone exchange, so we keep electrics high and choose wall and floor finishes that can be washed down and dried.

Level-access showers, wider doors, blocking in the walls for grab rails and room to turn are offered at the first layout rather than retrofitted, and the fan goes where it clears steam without drawing cold air across the shower.

First-fix pipes and cables are inspected before boarding, tanking goes on before tiling, and the sanitaryware is fitted last so that no other trade can damage it.

Outside Chalfont St Giles, and in London rather than Buckinghamshire: Project example: Maida Vale, W9. That project of ours was a whole-house refurbishment of a Victorian townhouse; its case study records bathrooms installed within that same refurbishment, the services to them routed in the renewal.

Sources: GOV.UK: Approved Document F, Volume 1: Dwellings, 2021 edition; Chiltern and South Bucks District Councils: Strategic Flood Risk Assessment Level 1 (November 2018); Hampstead Renovations: Victorian Townhouse, Maida Vale W9 case study