Renovations in Harlesden

The terraces around Harlesden High Street and the Jubilee Clock were built quickly and cheaply for railway workers, and their proportions still show it. Two rooms deep, a cramped rear addition, solid brickwork, a small yard and no rear access worth the name. Renovation briefs here are almost always about space: getting a usable kitchen and dining area on the ground floor, finding a third bedroom, and stopping the ground floor from feeling like a corridor with rooms attached. The building work itself is rarely complicated. Doing it in a house you cannot get a wheelbarrow around the back of is the real skill.

Winning Space in a Small Terrace

Three moves do most of the work in a house like this. Removing chimney breasts recovers usable width in the bedrooms and the front reception, because a breast and its hearth take a genuine bite out of a small floor plan. Opening the ground floor between front and rear rooms turns two dark spaces into one that works. Filling in beside the rear addition, where the plot allows, gives a kitchen the width it never had. Each move takes load off masonry and puts it onto a beam, so each one is designed by the engineer we appoint.

Chimney removal is the item people underestimate. Taking a breast out at ground floor leaves everything above it, sometimes two more storeys of brickwork and a stack above the roofline, needing support, and gallows brackets are not accepted for anything substantial. The proper answer is a designed steel picking the stack up and carrying it to sound bearings. It is notifiable work, building control inspects it, and where a stack is shared with next door it is also notifiable under the Party Wall etc. Act. None of that adds much to a programme when it is planned from the start.

Everything Goes Through the Front Door

There is no side gate on most of these houses, so the working method has to accept that spoil, timber, plasterboard, steel and waste all travel through the hallway. We protect floors and the staircase before anything arrives, run a covered route to the working area, and keep a barrow route that does not wreck the finishes we are trying to keep. Excavated material from foundations comes out the same way and is loaded straight into a skip or bags. It is slower than a job with rear access and it is entirely predictable once it is priced and programmed properly.

Kerb space is the other scarce resource. Parking on the streets off the High Street is controlled, so we apply for the skip permit and any bay suspension from Brent Council before work is booked, and deliveries are timed rather than left open. Scaffold to the rear of a terrace usually has to be carried through the house or across a neighbour's ground, which needs their agreement in advance. We speak to neighbours early, keep the frontage swept, and pull materials in as they are needed instead of stacking a week of them on the pavement.

Where most Harlesden projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Harlesden, everything we cover across Brent, renovations in Wembley, renovations in Willesden and how to plan a renovation.