This week in the Examiner, Kieran McCarthy of KMC Homes provides advice for the most-suitable extension to go with when adding to the ground floor?
Q. We want to add a ground-floor extension, open up the kitchen to create the very popular kitchen/living/dining room and also a ground-floor bedroom with a bathroom to future-proof it. Architects seem to love flat-roof extensions or low-pitch membrane ones. My husband is quite traditional and likes the idea of a property with what he calls “a proper roof” as he steeples his fingers to make a point and says this is tried and tested, and that troublesome flat roofs from previous decades just prove his point. Where do you stand on this?
A. The simplest and most common (and cost-effective) roof is generally a pitched roof with either slates or tiles. This is the roof you will see on most houses (for these very reasons) and they generally fall into gutters and downpipes taking your roof water to the soakaways in your garden. These roofs work very well as the water moves quickly away from the roof due to the falls and into your gutters. The downside of pitched roofs is that their design becomes a little cumbersome when used in congested lower roof settings, particularly in single-storey extensions. It is often for this very reason that architects often tend to employ flat roofs.
View full article in The Examiner here.
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