Loft extension revamp

[KendraCha]

Hello all,

this is my first post so apologies if I get anything wrong!

We bought a house last year that has a loft extension.

The stair case leading to the room is covered, creating a large obstruction in the middle of the room, taking a lot of space and making the room feel much smaller. We would like to take this down and move the door to the room at the bottom of the stairs.

We have discovered several potential issues regarding building control:
1. We need a landing between the stairs and the door. At the moment the stairs start at the same level as the wall of the corridor, so we will need to reduce the length of the stairs by about 68cm (which is the width of the stairs).
--> has anyone ever installed paddle stairs before? Is building control usually OK with the installation of these stairs?

2. We cannot have a normal hinged / swinging door: we cannot have the door to open onto the corridor, and we cannot have the door opening into the stair case as we would need 40cm on top of the 68cm and that would make the stairs way too steep.
--> does anyone know if wall mounted sliding doors can be at the fire retardant standard that building control would want?

Thanks in advance for your help and if anything isn't clear please let me know.

Kendra

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

Building Control are unlikely to support a non traditional stair unless there are no other options ie if this were a new loft conversion and the conversion could not be made to work with a standard stair then it could be an option but as you are in an existing situation that negotiating power is removed. you could get your local BCO round for a chat but I suspect they will not relent, many are helpful and practical though like every profession some can be useless.

You can get sliding fire resistant doors though. http://www.eclisse.co.uk/Product-Range/Single/Single-Fire

 

[KendraCha]

thanks freddymercurystwin,

so I guess this is game over before we even start to play?
this is so dissapointing, the way this extension has been designed is really not ideal and a lot of corners were already cut from what I can see (the stairs are steeper than regs for example).

for the door I did see those, but ours will have to be a wall mounted one, we can't have a door that goes into the wall...

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

Well as mentioned some BCO's are quite helpful so may be worth a punt trying to get them out. To get the sliding door to work in such a situation you would just build a false partition in front of the existing to create your pocket., if you can lose the 75mm or thereabouts space of course ....