Renovations in Highbury

One plan repeats itself along the streets between Highbury Fields and the Emirates Stadium: a bay to the front, two rooms deep, a narrow closet wing running back over the garden, solid nine inch brickwork and a suspended timber ground floor sitting over a shallow void. Once you know that plan you know most of what a renovation in N5 will involve before the floorboards come up. GS Renovation refurbishes these houses whole and works on the flats inside the ones that were divided, coordinating the structural engineer, the building control application and every trade under one named project manager.

The Side Return And The Closet Wing

The strip of ground beside the closet wing is the single most useful thing a Highbury terrace owns, and filling it turns a corridor kitchen into a room the family actually uses. The complications are all at the joins. That rear wing was built lightly, often on foundations far shallower than the main house, so the new work has to be founded properly and tied in without dragging the old brickwork with it. Opening the back wall for glazing puts a substantial load onto a corner that has never carried one, so we appoint a structural engineer to design the opening and its bearings before any pricing is finalised.

Because the houses are terraced, the excavation and any beam bearing into shared masonry bring duties under the Party Wall Act. You serve those notices as the building owner and we plan the programme around the response period rather than hoping it resolves itself. Islington Council building control inspects the excavation before concrete goes in, then the steel, the damp proof detailing, the insulation and the drainage as the build proceeds. We book those visits, meet the inspector and pass you the completion paperwork, which is what a buyer's solicitor will want to see one day.

What A Hundred And Forty Years Has Left Behind

Strip a Highbury house back and the surprises are consistent. Joists notched to within an inch of uselessness where a bathroom was plumbed in the seventies. Earlier openings formed on a timber lintel with a bearing you would not trust a shelf to. Ceiling laths that have lost their key and are held up mostly by the paper. Joist ends that have rotted quietly in the damp masonry behind the bay. None of it is unusual and none of it is a disaster, but it does mean an honest renovation here allows for opening things up and looking, rather than pricing off a set of assumptions.

The floors themselves are worth attention while they are open. Airbricks that were bricked up or buried under a raised patio leave the void beneath the boards unventilated, which is the beginning of most timber trouble in these houses. We clear and reinstate ventilation, insulate between the joists while access is easy, and deal with services in the same visit so the boards are lifted once and not three times. Deliveries and waste collections around Highbury Fields are planned around event days at the stadium, which is simply easier than arguing with the traffic.

Where most Highbury projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Highbury, everything we cover across Islington, renovations in Angel, renovations in Holloway and how to plan a renovation.