Builders in Burgess Hill

Burgess Hill is a few minutes down the road from us and, like Haywards Heath, it is a town the railway made. The difference is when it grew. Most of Burgess Hill went up after the war, and that single fact shapes nearly everything we get asked to do here.

A town of 1950s to 1970s houses

The postwar and mid-century estates that make up much of Burgess Hill are, on the whole, well built, generously plotted and thoroughly dated in their layout. Small separate kitchens, a dining room nobody eats in, and a garage that has not held a car in twenty years.

That produces three jobs over and over: opening the back of the house up with a rear extension, converting the loft, and refitting kitchens and bathrooms that are original to the house.

The trussed roof problem

One thing worth knowing before you plan a loft conversion in Burgess Hill. Houses built from roughly the mid-1960s onwards usually have trussed rafter roofs, with W-shaped webs filling the loft space rather than the open framing of an older cut roof.

They can still be converted. But the trusses are doing structural work and cannot simply be cut away, so the floor and the roof have to be independently supported first, usually on new steels. It is a bigger job than the same conversion on a 1930s house, and it is the reason two apparently similar quotes on two apparently similar houses can differ considerably. Anyone who prices your loft without going up into it is guessing.

Newer housing

Burgess Hill has kept growing, and the newer developments around the edges of the town need different work again: garden rooms, garage conversions, glazing and finishing rather than structural alteration.

Planning

Mid Sussex District Council, the same authority as Haywards Heath, Cuckfield and Lindfield. Many single storey rear extensions on detached and semi-detached houses in the town fall under permitted development, though the limits are tighter on terraces. We will tell you at survey which side of that line you are on, and handle the application if you need one.