More homeowners are improving the house they already have rather than moving. A loft turned into a home office, a garden room at the end of the lawn, a kitchen opened up at the back — there are plenty of ways to get more out of a home you like.
Whatever the project, building work goes better with proper drawings. Sometimes they are needed to apply for planning permission or for building regulations approval. Often they are simply what stops your builder guessing. If your project is an extension, our house extension drawings page covers what you get and what it costs, at a fixed price. This guide is about the two projects people most often assume they can skip drawings for: loft conversions and garden rooms.
Loft conversions
You may not need planning permission to turn a loft into a habitable room. In England, many loft conversions count as permitted development, within limits on the volume you add and on how a dormer sits relative to the existing roof slope. Wales sets its own rules, so check before you assume yours is covered. Our guide to whether you need planning permission is a good place to start.
Drawings still earn their keep. They show you, and your council, that what you are building stays inside those limits — which is how you avoid a breach of planning control and the slow, costly remedial work that can follow. If you want it confirmed in writing, your drawings support an application to the council for a lawful development certificate.
A loft conversion also needs building regulations approval, whether or not it needs planning permission. Section drawings carrying the specifications and notes a building control officer looks for let you get that approval sorted before anyone lifts a tool, so the build is not held up waiting. Loft conversion drawings cover both sides.
Garden rooms
Garden rooms are the project people most often build without drawings, and the one where it tends to bite. In England, an outbuilding is usually permitted development if it is single storey with eaves no higher than 2.5 metres, and an overall height of no more than four metres for a dual-pitched roof or three metres for any other roof. Within two metres of a boundary, the whole building has to stay under 2.5 metres. Buildings and other additions together must not cover more than half the land around the original house. Wales differs again, so check locally.
Those are the kind of limits you can breach by a few centimetres without meaning to. A measured drawing settles it before the slab goes down. Whether building regulations apply depends on the size of the building and how you plan to use it, which is worth checking early — particularly if anyone will be sleeping in there.
Drawings help with the ordinary things too. You get to move a door or stretch the floor plan on paper, where changes cost nothing, and your builder works from something definite rather than a sketch. Garden room drawings are a small cost against a build you will only do once.
Planning an extension instead?
Extensions have their own page, because the drawings and the approvals work differently. See house extension drawings for the planning drawings, the permitted development check and the building regulations package, all at a fixed price.
Talk to us about your project
We offer homeowners an alternative to a local architect: drawings produced online, at a fixed price, with no hourly billing. If you have a loft, a garden room or anything else in mind and you are not sure which drawings you need, get in touch and we will tell you straight. You can also look at some of our previous work to get a feel for the quality of the drawings we produce.