Trusted Builders Serving Caerphilly

Extensions and renovations on valley stock

Most of the building work we take on around Caerphilly, Bedwas, Abertridwr and Llanbradach is on stone or solid-brick terraces built for a different era of family life — small separate rooms, a narrow rear addition, and a garden that climbs away from the back door.

• Rear additions. Many of these houses already have one. Whether to extend it, rebuild it or take it off and start again is usually the first real decision, and it is worth making on the basis of what is actually holding it up.
• Knock-throughs and openings. Opening up the ground floor needs a calculated steel and Building Control sign-off, and in a mid-terrace it engages the Party Wall Act on both sides — two notices, each with its own statutory notice period.
• Ground levels. On a sloping plot the ground at the rear is often higher than the internal floor, which is a common cause of damp at the back of these houses and something to solve before decorating over it.

Caerphilly County Borough Council

Planning and building control here sit with Caerphilly County Borough Council, a different authority from Cardiff with its own local development plan. For most single-storey rear extensions on these plots permitted development applies, subject to the depth and height limits and to the property not having been extended already — earlier work counts against the same allowance, which is easy to overlook on a house that has changed hands a few times.

Getting a build run on a terraced street

Terraced rows on a gradient with on-street parking and no rear lane make access a real planning item. Skip position, delivery slots and the route materials take through the house all need agreeing before the first day rather than during it, and a highway skip permit comes from the council in advance.

Damp, and why it is usually not rising

A large share of the calls we take around Caerphilly are about damp in solid-wall terraces, and in most cases the cause is not what the homeowner has been told. Before anyone injects a chemical course, it is worth ruling out the far more common culprits: ground levels raised above the internal floor at the rear, a blocked or leaking gutter soaking one patch of wall, cement render or pointing trapping moisture in a wall built to breathe, and blocked underfloor vents under a suspended timber floor.

Those are cheaper to fix and they address the cause. We would rather spend a survey working out which one it is than sell a treatment that covers the symptom for a year.

Roofs and chimneys on exposed rows

Hillside terraces above the town take weather that the valley floor does not, and the failures follow a pattern: slipped slates from nail fatigue, chimney flaunching cracking, and lead at the abutments giving up before the covering does. Because these rows share scaffold access along the terrace, combining roofing, pointing and gutter work into one visit usually costs less than doing them a year apart.