Addition of shower room, and move of current bathroom

[The Riviera Kid]

Hi folks, a couple of quick questions for you.

We're attempting to modify our ex-housing association property to be a comfortable size for the family (currently it's a little "compact"), some of the things we're looking to do would be completed 100% by professional paid builders (eg future loft conversion), so any building regs/planning related stuff would be taken care of by them, but other things we're looking to do ourselves (I'm a reasonably sensible and competant DIY'er) with a little free help/advice from friends in the trade.

A couple of the things we're looking to do ourselves is to install a downstairs shower room/wc, and to move the current bathroom from the front of the house, to a more suitable (in terms of layout) space at the back of the house, which will free up space for an extra bedroom which we need. Read on....


[u][b]Ground Floor Shower room/wc Installation[/b][/u]
Every other house in the street except ours has a cloakroom/wc in the space we've earmarked for the shower room/wc. The plumbing is there, a soil pipe is there, and there's even a 1ft square window (which looks really odd given there's a big window further along in the kitchen). What we'd like to do, is partition this off as it probably should have been in the beginning, with a door coming off the entrance hall completely seperate to the kitchen, and a shower/toilet/basin installed. Some questions:-

1) Is this likely to need any sort of involvement from building control/regulations? Does the fact that there's a cloakroom in that space in all the other houses in the street make a difference?

2) If building controls/regulations involvement is needed. As all the drainage and plumbing are already there, assuming it's done to a proper safe standard, is there any drawbacks to not going through building controls/regulations? We're not planning on leaving the house any time soon.

[u][b]Current 1st Floor bathroom[/b][/u]
The current 1st floor bathroom is at the front of the house, and not in the best position (a fair bit of wasted space). I've worked out that I can move this to the back of the house, and free up enough space to (with a little bit of re-jigging of a partition) add another small bedrom. We'd have to use a saniflo macerator unit, which I'm not too bothered about as it would be a 2nd bathroom, so we'd have a backup if the saniflo for some reason failed.

1) Again, is buildings control/regulations involvement required? I'm guessing it probably does if only from the point of view of making inspecting that the joists in the new space can support the extra weight of a bathfull of water.

2) Again if it was installed properly and safely, is there anything I need to be aware of in the event buildings control/regulations involvement was needed and we chose not to go through this channel.


I'll probably contact building control/regulations regarding the 1st floor bathroom (just to be safe), but I'm particularly interested in the situation regards the downstairs shower room/wc, given we're the only house in the street (as far as I'm aware) without a cloakroom/wc already in the space.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance.

[The Riviera Kid]

I've been informed that I'll need to complete a Building Notice form and pay £136 for Building Control to come and inspect the job, which is fair enough. This is just for the downstairs shower room as it'll be the first job to be done.

Electrics will have to be moved (and given the age/crappy quality of the current electrics, I'll need a new Consumer Unit/rcd which we were planning on getting anyway), and the boiler relocated (possibly a good time for the new combi boiler we were planning anyway lol).

Can all of this stuff go on the same form and be subject to the same inspection fee given it's all connected?