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Planning permission is your local planning authority's consent for what you build and how it looks. A great many house extensions never need an application, because they fall under permitted development rights — a general permission granted nationally rather than by your council. The Planning Portal describes these as certain types of work you can carry out without applying for planning permission.

Permitted development is conditional, and the conditions are specific. Extensions and other buildings may cover no more than half the area of land around the original house; an extension may not be built forward of the principal elevation; it may not exceed the height of the existing roof; and where it comes within two metres of a boundary, the eaves may be no higher than three metres. A single-storey rear extension is limited to four metres for a detached house and three metres for any other house, with a prior approval procedure for going further on land that is not designated.

GOV.UK puts it as plainly as it can be put: building regulations approval is different from planning permission, and you might need both. Planning is about whether something may be built and how it looks from outside; the Building Regulations are the minimum standards for the design, construction and alteration of virtually every building, covering structure, fire safety, ventilation, drainage, electrical safety and energy efficiency.

There are two kinds of building control body and you are free to choose between them: your local authority's building control service, or a private sector registered building control approver, registered under the Building Act 1984 with applications decided by the Building Safety Regulator in England and Wales. Whichever you use, the work pauses at set stages so the body can inspect, and the job ends with a completion certificate.

Keep that certificate. GOV.UK warns that without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need when you come to sell your home, and conveyancing solicitors ask for them as a matter of routine. A completion certificate is not, however, a guarantee or a warranty for the building work itself — it records compliance, not quality.

In a country built largely of terraces and semi-detached houses, the party wall is a constant. The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 applies in England and Wales and covers three things: work to an existing party wall or party structure, building a new wall at or astride the boundary, and excavation near a neighbouring building. It is a civil procedure between you and your neighbour, entirely separate from planning permission and building control, and skipping it is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes on a British renovation.

Because no licence exists, verifying a builder is a matter of assembling signals rather than checking one number. Some of those signals are voluntary schemes and some are legal requirements, and it is worth knowing which is which.

LokalMatch is where that search starts rather than where it ends. You describe the renovation once — what you want done, the property, your postcode and when you would like to begin — and matched builders in your area get in touch with you directly; contractors pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not carry out the work, does not set prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone, so every check below remains yours to make.

Chapter 4 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 is implied into every contract for a service between a trader and a consumer. The trader must perform the service with reasonable care and skill; statements about the service or the trader that you relied on become binding terms of the contract; where no price was fixed you need pay only a reasonable price; and where no time was fixed the work must be done within a reasonable time. If the service does not conform, you can require repeat performance at the trader's cost, or a price reduction that can run to the whole amount. A trader cannot contract out of any of it.

A contract you sign at your own kitchen table is an off-premises contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 — one concluded in the simultaneous physical presence of the trader and the consumer somewhere that is not the trader's business premises. You may cancel it at any time within the cancellation period without giving any reason, and for a service that period ends 14 days after the day the contract is entered into.

If you want the work to start inside those 14 days, the trader must not begin before the period ends unless you make an express request, which for an off-premises contract has to be on a durable medium. Start early on that basis and then cancel, and you pay a proportionate amount for what was actually done; if the trader never gave you the required information about your cancellation rights, you may owe nothing at all for the service. One carve-out matters here: contracts for constructing new buildings, or substantially new buildings created by converting existing ones, sit outside these Regulations altogether.

The Health and Safety Executive advises that asbestos may be present in any commercial or domestic building built or refurbished before the year 2000, in forms including asbestos cement products, insulating board, textured decorative coatings and floor tiles. The danger arises when the material is disturbed and fibres go into the air — when it is cut, drilled or broken — which is precisely what stripping out a room involves. In an owner-occupied home the formal duty to manage asbestos does not apply, because the owner is not carrying out a work activity, but HSE advises telling any builders, maintenance workers or contractors about asbestos materials in your home before they start.

Health and safety duties on the site itself are governed by the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. As a domestic client — anyone having construction work done that is not in connection with a business — your client duties normally pass to the contractor where there is one contractor, or to the principal contractor where there is more than one. Where several contractors are involved you can instead agree in writing with your designer that they take on the client duties as principal designer.