Garage conversion advice please

[jane11]

Hi, we are looking for some advice on a garage conversion we are planning please.

We have a single integrated garage which we want to convert to a dining room with an area at one end for washing machine/tumbler dryer. The work needed is fairly standard - new floor needed (currently there's a concrete base), walls need insulating, sockets need moving, lighting needs changing (there's tube lighting there at present), heating needs to be fitted. Pipes, vent etc for washer and dryer are already there - machines don't need to be moved. A stud wall needs building down one side to cover all the meters etc and quite few pipes which would be tricky to move. One ceiling pipe needs to be moved up into the ceiling. The garage door needs to be replaced with a 4 foot window and the lower part of the current opening needs to be bricked up. At present there is a door and a small window at the back; the window is to be widened to full width (approx 6 foot) and the gap where the bottom of the door was to be bricked up - this involves widening the lintel. We need some kind of heating.

We've had a few quotes and they vary wildly from approx £8500 (no VAT payable) to £16,500 plus VAT. The expensive builder is accredited with the Federation of Master Builders, Trustmark, ECB etc. The others don't seem to have any accreditations.

Can anyone please advise on any of our queries:
- How do we choose a builder? Should we choose someone who is FMB etc accredited?
- What sort of price have others paid for a similar project?
- What sort of floor would people recommend please? We would like Amtico inside and different builders have recommended a concrete screed, floating chipboard, or non-floating chipboard floor secured to timber beams (all of these would need a layer of ply on the top for Amtico to be fitted).
- Heating options. We have underfloor heating (water pipes) in the rest of our downstairs. Extending this is very impractical. So we are choosing between new gas radiator, new electric radiator, or electric underfloor heating. Any thoughts as to which we should choose? Again different builders advise different options.

Thanks for any thoughts/advice/information.

 

[ericmark]

All I can say is what happened to me, we wanted a pantry and outside toilet converting into a wet room, there was a time constraint and like you wildly different quotes, my son and I are both electricians and we wanted to DIY, but sister said we never finished a job, so was insisting it was done by a builder. It was to take two weeks, at which point mother would come home.

Well my son and I kept our distance, it was down to my sister and father, only thing we go involved with, electrician offered to swap whole consumer unit for new rather than fit a second one just for wet room at £100 and we said yes that's a very good price.

On getting home with mother the work was not complete, the firm clearly had miss calculated on how long it would take, and also had made errors as to where to fit towel rail it fouled the door, lucky my dad when house was built had decided he may need the toilet access from inside so lintel already in place. Anyway the builder had some out of date tile cement which was not going off, he was blaming my mother for going into toilet with wheel chair, but that was what it was designed for. He would come for 6 hours then disappear, I guess he had another job started some where, he would be missing for days on end, and my son arrived one day, lost his temper with the guy who walked off the job.

Now our troubles really started, we could not find a builder to take over the work, nothing for it but DIY, since we thought it was being done all above board, first thing was to phone the local authority building control and say we wanted to take over the work. That was a mistake, we found he had not applied for planning permission, lucky since for the disabled no charge, but although satisfied with drains and he did not ask for them to be dug out again for inspection, he was not keen for us to do electrics, in the end he said yes, and we took over. Well we found.
1) The door entrance had been moved, so lintel no longer was supported.
2) The under floor heating had been damaged and insulation tape put on the damage under tiles which would have water on them as a wet room.
3) The electrician had removed one RCD and replaced it with an isolator where he could not stop the earth leakage.
4) The ceiling fan was damaged.
5) The seat for use in the shower was not suitable for the wall it was being fixed to.
6) The tile cement was not drying we had to remove all tiles clean and start again.
7) The loo was too close to the wall so could not be used with a commode wheel chair.
The list goes on and on, it was actually a bigger job putting everything right than it would have been starting the job from scratch, they had only really done one job correctly and that was fit the RSJ which replaced the wall between pantry and toilet. In the end it cost double what it should have cost, and the council hounded the firm over the jobs it had done and it went to the wall so no chance of getting any money back. I am not saying you can't get a cheap job, but you have to be very careful. Including ensuring the council planning permission has actually been applied for, what we found was it is the owner who is reasonable for getting planning permission although most builders do it for the owner, so reason why many others said they could not do it within time scale was they knew it would take time to get the permission. When I came to look at converting my garage as the builder arrived it was, the LABC will insist we do this this and this, and it was the bits the builder knew they would insist on which would cost the money. Lucky we had the money, had it been me rather than dad it would have been even more of a problem as I would not have had the money to put it right.
Oh and as for building control, they missed the unsupported lintel so don't rely on them.