Renovations in Morden

Housing in Morden was built to a plan and it shows. The interwar expansion that produced the streets around Morden Park and the St Helier estate used a small number of standard house types repeated across a very large area, which means the property you are renovating is almost certainly one whose equivalent we have worked in before. That helps with sequencing and with knowing where the surprises normally hide. It does not remove the need to design each job individually, because what previous owners have done to these houses varies enormously even where the original drawings did not.

Standard House Types, Individual Jobs

The familiar SM4 brief is a rear extension, a reworked kitchen, a downstairs WC, a bathroom that no longer dates from the 1980s and a full rewire, often all in one programme. Because the original plans repeat, the practical questions repeat with them: where the stair lands, which wall carries the first floor, how much of the rear wall can come out, and where the boiler and meters end up. The structure is still designed for your house specifically, because two apparently identical properties can have had entirely different alterations over the last forty years.

The construction itself is honest and workable. Cavity walls, a hipped or gabled roof depending on the type, timber first floors and modest spans, which keeps beam sizes sensible when the ground floor is opened up. Where a house has been extended before, the join between old and new deserves close examination, because that is where insulation stops, where damp proof courses fail to line up and where roof coverings meet badly. We open those junctions up and put them right rather than building over them. Roof coverings on these types have generally had one replacement by now, so the condition of felt, battens and flashings is worth establishing early.

Sewers Under the Garden

On estate layouts of this period, public sewers frequently run through rear gardens rather than under the road, and a great many extensions here sit over or beside one. Building over or within three metres of a public sewer requires a build over agreement from Thames Water, applied for before construction starts. It is a normal process rather than a refusal waiting to happen, but it takes time and it can change the foundation design, so it belongs at the beginning of a project. A drainage asset search shows what is there before anything is drawn.

Where an extension has to cross a sewer, the engineer usually designs the foundation to bridge it so no load is transferred onto the pipe, and existing manholes may need raising, relocating or replacing with a sealed cover of the correct type. None of that is unusual and all of it is far less disruptive when it is known at design stage rather than discovered by a groundworker. We arrange the search, submit the application, and build to whatever the approved details require. The application also asks how surface and foul water will be handled around the new structure, so both designs are prepared together rather than one after the other.

Where most Morden projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Morden, everything we cover across Merton, renovations in Wimbledon, renovations in Mitcham and renovation order of works.