Home Renovations near you

Renovation is a broad word and the first useful thing a builder does is narrow it. Most domestic projects fall into one of a handful of shapes, and the shape decides which consents apply, how long you can stay in the house and how much of the work is invisible when it is finished.

Age of stock matters more than size. A house built before about 1920 was designed to breathe through solid walls and suspended floors, and renovation choices that trap moisture in it behave differently from the same choices in a cavity-walled semi. A house built or refurbished before the year 2000 may contain asbestos, which changes the order of a strip-out rather than the ambition of it.

Take the two consents in the right order. Planning permission is concerned with the outside: what a development looks like, where it sits, what it does to neighbours and to the street. Internal reconfiguration of an ordinary house is usually of no interest to a planning authority at all, unless the building is listed, unless the property is a flat or maisonette, or unless the work changes the outside of the building. Building regulations approval is concerned with how the work is built, and it can apply to work that is entirely invisible from the pavement.

GOV.UK lists alteration projects for which you might also need building regulations approval, and the word is might. Its list includes replacing fuse boxes and connected electrics, installing a bathroom that will involve plumbing, changing electrics near a bath or shower, putting in a fixed air-conditioning system, replacing windows and doors, replacing roof coverings on pitched and flat roofs, installing or replacing a heating system, and adding extra radiators to a heating system. It also warns that you could need approval, or need to follow special rules, for work that is not on that list, so the honest answer for any specific project is to ask a building control body rather than to reason from the list.

The exemptions are just as worth knowing, because they are what stop a modest renovation turning into an application. GOV.UK treats most repairs, replacements and maintenance work as exempt, with heating systems, oil tanks, fuse boxes and glazing units carved back out again, along with new power and lighting points or changes to existing circuits except around baths and showers, replacing baths, toilets, basins and sinks, installing insulation in roof spaces or under timber floors, gutters and downpipes, and external doors where less than half of the door is glazed. Note how carefully that last one is drawn. It is not that doors are exempt.

A significant slice of British housing sits under an extra layer of control, and the homeowner is often the last to find out. Two of those layers restrict permitted development rights, the national grant of planning permission that lets householders alter and extend without applying. The Planning Portal defines Article 2(3) designated land as land within a conservation area, an area of outstanding natural beauty, an area specified by the Secretary of State for the enhancement and protection of the natural beauty and amenity of the countryside, the Broads, a National Park or a World Heritage Site. An Article 4 direction goes further: it is a direction issued by a local planning authority removing some or all permitted development rights, for example within a conservation area or the curtilage of a listed building.

Listed building control is different in kind, not merely in degree, and it reaches inside the house. Under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 it is an offence to contravene section 7, which is the section requiring listed building consent for works of demolition, alteration or extension affecting a listed building's character as a building of special architectural or historic interest. Failing to comply with a condition attached to a consent is also an offence. Section 9 directs the court, when fixing a fine, to have particular regard to any financial benefit that has accrued or appears likely to accrue from the offence. This is criminal law, it applies to internal work, and it does not care that the work improved the building.

Flats and maisonettes sit outside householder permitted development rights altogether, so alterations a house could make freely may need an application. On top of planning law there is usually a lease, and a lease commonly requires the freeholder's written consent for alterations. Read the lease before you collect quotes, not after.

Where approval is needed, you apply to a building control body, and in England and Wales you may choose your local council's building control department or a private registered building control approver. If you use a registered approver, they tell your local authority about the work by giving what is called an initial notice. Fees follow the route: local authorities base their fees on their costs and take account of the type of work, the site inspections, the number of dwellings and the total floor area, while private approvers negotiate their fees directly with you.

There are then two ways in. A full plans application is the thorough option, with a decision expected within five weeks, or two months with your consent, and a completion certificate usually issued within eight weeks of the work finishing so long as it complies. A building notice is only for smaller projects; work can start two days after the notice is submitted, and there is no formal approval of the kind full plans gives you. For a renovation with any structural content, full plans is the route that produces a document you can hand to a buyer.

Two further routes are worth knowing. If a project needs approval but you would rather not apply yourself, a tradesperson registered with a competent person scheme can self-certify their own work and, where needed, tell the local authority on your behalf; they must give you a certificate within eight weeks of completion, and GOV.UK notes it will show up in solicitors' searches when you sell. And if work has already been done without consent, regularisation is retrospective approval, available only from a local authority building control body, and only for work carried out after 11 November 1985. You may have to open work up or alter it before a regularisation certificate can be issued.

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 apply to domestic renovation, which surprises most homeowners, but they apply in a way designed to protect people who know nothing about construction. HSE defines a domestic client as anyone who has construction work carried out for them that is not done in connection with a business, usually work on their own home or the home of a family member, and says plainly that CDM 2015 passes the duties of a domestic client to certain other dutyholders.

Where those duties go depends on how many contractors are on site. On a single contractor project the client duties pass automatically to that contractor. Where more than one contractor is involved they pass to the principal contractor, and if no principal contractor has been appointed, to the contractor in control of the construction work. There is one alternative: on a project with more than one contractor, a domestic client who has engaged an architect or other designer can ask them to manage the project and take on the client duties instead, but that only works if there is a written agreement confirming it, and the designer then becomes the principal designer. Without that written agreement the duties revert to the principal contractor, whatever anyone assumed.

HSE is equally clear about what is left with you. A domestic client does not need any skills, knowledge or experience of managing construction work. What they should do is make reasonable enquiries of the people they bring in about their awareness of health and safety risks and their track record in managing them, and allow enough time and money in the agreed contract for the work to be done safely. A price that only works if corners are cut is a health and safety issue, not just a commercial one.

On a terraced or town-centre street the highway is part of the site, and the Highways Act 1980 controls it separately from anything the planning department does. Section 139 states that a builders' skip must not be deposited on a highway without the permission of the highway authority for that highway, and that permission may be granted subject to conditions. Depositing a skip on a highway without permission is an offence by the owner of the skip, punishable by a fine, and where the offence is due to the act or default of another person, that person is guilty of it too.

Scaffolding has its own licence. Section 169 provides that, in connection with building or demolition work or the alteration, repair, maintenance or cleaning of a building, no one may erect or retain on or over a highway any scaffolding or other structure that obstructs the highway unless authorised by a licence in writing from the highway authority, and unless they comply with the terms of that licence. The authority has a duty to issue a licence to an applicant who provides the particulars it reasonably demands, unless it considers one of the statutory grounds for refusal applies, and there is a right of appeal to a magistrates' court against a refusal or against terms the applicant objects to. Contravening section 169 is an offence.

Asbestos sits alongside this as a shared responsibility that is often misread. HSE states that asbestos may be part of any commercial or domestic building built or refurbished before the year 2000, and that it was widely used until 1999 when it was banned. It also notes that in owner-occupied domestic properties the owners are not legally responsible for risks to contractors from asbestos, because the owners themselves are not engaged in any work activity, but the contractor still is, and the duties fall on them. HSE advises homeowners not to try to repair or remove asbestos materials themselves without training for non-licensed work, and points to the environmental health officer at the local authority for advice.

Every contract to supply a service to a consumer is treated by section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 as including a term that the trader must perform the service with reasonable care and skill. Where the contract does not fix the time for performance, section 52 treats it as including a term that the service must be performed within a reasonable time, and what is reasonable is a question of fact. Those terms are implied by statute: they are in your contract whether or not anyone wrote them down.

The remedies are specific. Section 55 gives a right to require repeat performance, meaning the trader must perform the service again to the extent necessary to bring it into conformity with the contract, at their own cost, within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to you. You cannot demand it where completing performance in conformity with the contract is impossible. Section 56 gives a right to a price reduction by an appropriate amount, which may where appropriate be the whole price, and any refund must be given without undue delay and in any event within 14 days of the trader agreeing you are entitled to it, by the same means of payment you used, with no fee imposed for the refund.

In practice these rights are only as useful as the record behind them. A written specification, a schedule of payments tied to stages rather than to dates, photographs taken before work is covered up, and the building control paperwork are what turn a disagreement into a claim you can actually make.

Building control and planning are devolved, and the differences are structural rather than cosmetic. GOV.UK's building regulations guidance applies to England and Wales and states outright that there are different rules in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In Scotland the equivalent consent is a building warrant from the council, applied for before work begins. In Northern Ireland the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012 are administered by district councils' building control, and planning is run by those same councils under separate Northern Irish legislation, with permitted development rights that carry their own dimension restrictions and are restricted in designated areas.

One statute in this guide does not travel at all. The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 extends to England and Wales only, so a Scottish or Northern Irish homeowner excavating beside a neighbour's building is dealing with common law and their building control body, not with party wall notices and surveyors' awards.