Judith and I decided we would like to change our old, out of date conservatory at our home in Holywell Green, Halifax into a functioning room that will enhance our property.

Below is our old Upvc Conservatory that has served us well for many years:

This enhancement involved a significant amount of work to bring the building works up to the current standards required by Building Control. The design we agreed upon involved taking the whole structure and supporting underground front wall away to allow new concrete footings to be laid and the introduction of some necessary steelwork to strengthen the pillars along with three substantial steel roof girders to support the roof timbers.

The original conservatory had a few steps inside to descend to the floor level, so we were never able to see our garden properly, so we thought it through and chose to raise the floor level to allow us to have a nice view into the garden in future. This was achieved by installing a solid Bison beam concrete flooring system which was covered with concrete screed, with a 100-mm insulation floor, topped off with a chip-wood finished floor ready for carpeting.

After some deliberation, the roof finally chosen is the highly insulated flat rubber roof which is designed to fall towards the back of the room and deposit the rain water directly into an aluminium box gutter. Fitted to the roof is a blue tinted glass lantern, placed in the centre of the roof to illuminate the new room below.

The well-engineered sturdy aluminium framed glass lantern is coloured in Anthracite Grey outside and White inside. This was key to making the effect of installing the solid roof insignificant, in terms of daylight light loss from converting from the old-fashioned uPVC roof, to a solid roof. As you can see, the effect is quite stunning and the bonus for us is that the light continues to flood into the adjacent rooms.

With two new Irish Oak uPVC windows and a new door to compliment them, the whole effect was to blend the new room into the existing home, which we feel has worked perfectly.

We chose to use a matching stone to course through from the old stone wall to the right-hand side and make the building works appear to be seamless once the green lichen has taken hold, the builders took this onboard and did a splendid job and even took the stone right through to the coping stones to top off the front wall to finish everything off professionally.

There was the requirement to install a land drain and a surface drain to collect any rainwater to prevent any damp penetration into the home.

Three wall lights outside will illuminate the drive at night, and the ceiling lights which will be dimmable will provide a feeling of mood lighting to the new room, with a wall mounted T.V to finish it off.

All the walls are highly insulated to prevent heat loss.

We have incorporated two large central heating radiators with thermostatic radiator valves into the design, one of which is fed from the main gas boiler and the other from the wood burning stove in the lounge.

Close up photo of the end result:

We would like to extend our best regards to all those people who helped us bring this job together despite the awful weather we went through.

Keep a look out for various other blogs on this project as it moves towards completion.