Planning for the future - if there is one

You might have noticed that not a lot has been happening here of late, but one of the primary reasons is that we don't actually want to do all that much.

We've 'engaged the services' of an architect with a view to extending, you see, so we can't really start making changes anywhere in case we end up ripping them all out because we want an indoor swimming pool and underground sex dungeon... for example. Which we don't. We're not keen swimmers.

And the thing with architects and plans and wotnot is that that kind of thing takes time to sort out, included in which is a tremendous amount of cogitation and chin-stroking rather than spontaneous gun-jumping.

How things currently look

Our architect, Peter, was recommended to us by a neighbour as someone who has been in the industry for so long that he has now retired from it and has little else to do other than play tennis and watch Homes Under the Hammer, so he likes to keep his hand in.
He has been the brains behind a couple of very nice homes in the area and gazillions of others elsewhere - so he knows his stuff - and his rates are particularly attractive because he's no longer a corporate robot with £ signs in his eyes.
He's also a very pleasant chap and recently brought us some cooking apples from his garden which Dawn magicked in to a crumble which she then froze and forgot about. So we have apple crumble in the freezer.

Dawn.
Apple crumble.
I like apple crumble.
I'm not sure where the freezer is and I can't work the oven.
Dawn?

Having never made a planning application before we're completely new to everything from beginning to end, so we're kind of feeling our way along slowly.
We know we want a bigger Kitchen - probably as a large kitchen/diner - and a bathroom which can accommodate both a bath and a person at the same time would be nice too. So that's at least work on a ground floor extension but it would ideally mean a two-storey add-on being built subject to planning and money.

The first plan for a single-storey extension.
There was another one with a secret courtyard but I can't find it.

All simple enough so far, you might think, but a new bathroom would mean opening up the current landing which would give us room to do something with the dangerously-steep Victorian stairs, which in turn might impact upon the existing bedrooms and the Dining Room where the stairs come down in to an adjoining cupboard... etc.

Then there's the outside.
We want the extension to move out the back of The Lodge across the existing courtyard, somehow encompassing the old outbuildings, and doing that would mean knocking down the garage which would be blocking the view to the garden... so we'd need a new garage... so we can't really work on the garden even if it wasn't snowing outside...
...and on it goes.

The net result is that we can't really do all that much until decisions are made about the future of the property.
Yes, there are a few niggly jobs outstanding but nothing important enough to encourage us in to major action (although we're finally going to get round to lagging the loft soon), which leaves us - especially me, because Dawn is distracted by real employment stuff - at a bit of a loose end.

The latest plans for our consideration
(Click to make it bigger)

And the dangerous part of being in Limbo is that I've got time to let my brain run around a little bit.
I'm beginning to think that a Trump-proof bunker could actually be a good idea.

Seriously.

Look at it this way: at some point over the next four years, should the permanently-furious and astonishingly-tactless DJT not end up on a drawer in a freezer, there's likely to be some kind of jolly old knees-up between him, Vlad, Kim, Bashar, Xi and probably one or two other despots people, and we'll all be invited whether we want to be or not.
To update a popular movie reference: "Our intercontinental ballistic missiles will block out the sun." Attribute that where you will.

Paranoid, lying, arrogant, shouty lunatic

So somewhere in the back of my mind I'm digging a great big hole at the back of The Lodge, lowering in a shipping container, filling its shelves with five years' worth of baked beans, covering it up with mud and grass, adding a trapdoor hidden in the floor of a shed and waiting for the sirens. Quite a lot like this (turn the sound down a bit).

Most people would have laughed at the idea a few years ago, but I'm not so sure now.

We've hit a Grade A snag

Looking ahead to our longer-term plans for The Lodge, we've had a couple of architects over to give us some ideas for an extension.

We're not sure what we want because this kind of thing isn't exactly our forte, but the Kitchen is pokey, as is the Bathroom and the upstairs landing area needs something doing to it because the stairs are too steep and there's a brain-rattling overhang halfway up.

So with that in mind we mainly want a bigger Kitchen/Diner and a Bathroom which can accommodate both a bath and a human being rather than either/or which isn't far off what we currently have. Here's the current floorplan.

This is the galley Kitchen (itself an extension) before we moved in and filled it full of stuff.
It's so narrow that the units on the right are wall cupboards, rather than regular wider floor-standing jobbies
which would have made the room almost impossible to get around. It's bad enough as it is.

Because of the amount of money we've spent so far we very much doubt we'd be able to do the whole thing at once, if at all, so the (very fluid) idea for now is perhaps to get a one- or two-storey shell up and out of the ground when funds allow and then do everything else in stages over a period of years. But the very first port of call is to find out what we can and can't do, which is where our chin-scratching, clipboard-carrying architects come in.

The first of those (two more are coming in a week or two) got back to us last night and presented us with a short list of all the lodges on the estate, under the heading Local List. We've seen this simple .pdf document before and although we weren't exactly sure of its purpose we filed it under 'quaint little lodges on our estate which someone wanted to make a note of for posterity'.

Of course there's another way to look at it, and the architect, who knows what he's doing, assures us that this is the correct interpretation:

The Lodge is LOCALLY LISTED.

Listed. Protected by law.

And just to twist the knife a little more, with options ranging from Grade C up to Grade A, guess what The Lodge is? Yep. You've got it.

This photograph (from before we moved in) was taken from outside the Bathroom, standing on the landing

I hope we're not the only people in the world not to know what something being locally listed means, so here's the very first 'what is a locally listed building?' search result from the Google, courtesy of Birmingham City Council:

A Locally Listed Building is a building, structure or feature which, whilst not listed by the Secretary of State, we feel is an important part of Birmingham's heritage due to its architectural, historic or archaeological significance.

The grading system for Locally Listed Buildings is as follows:-

Grade A (107 buildings)
These are buildings which are of statutory list quality, although not currently nationally listed. We will seek national listing or serve a Building Preservation Notice if it is imminently threatened...

...As with Statutory Listed Buildings, any works carried out should preserve or enhance the building and any features of architectural or historic interest retained and appropriate materials used.
Inclusion in the Local List does not give the building any statutory protection but we has [sic] additional policies in the Birmingham Plan to help guide development. 

Lovely. So the Brummies, if we lived there, could regard The Lodge as being important enough to slap a Grade I national listing on, which is the most restrictive thing imaginable in terms of building alterations and making a period property fit for modern-day living. It's the kind of thing grand stately mansions have to prevent cowboy builders destroying them.

Although we're yet to find out precisely what our own authorities make of locally listed buildings you can bet your bottom dollar that our Olympic-sized swimming pool is out the window and my indoor/outdoor orangutan sanctuary could even be under threat.

Further down the line we might even have to fight the council over things like windows, doorways, the roof, ceilings, internal walls, decor... the list is endless and chock-full of otherwise seemingly unimportant minutiae, all of which represent potential flies in the ointment. It could be a nightmare waiting to happen or it mightn't make the blindest bit of difference to us - I suspect we'll be somewhere in the middle.

One question you may be wondering is why our conveyancing solicitor didn't get round to telling us this rather important detail before we bought the property.

It's a very good question and one we plan to get to the bottom of. Perhaps it slipped his mind...