Your guide to London

Loft Conversions Costs London

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Male: We’ve had 3 quotes already, and we got these guys to quote as well, and what I kind of discovered was that every quote’s different, and so you’re not really ever comparing apples with apples, there’s kind of all kinds of different stuff going on. There were probably 2 companies that were very, kind of, much cheaper, but they were, when you looked through their quote there was the absolute basics, and it was only basically, another company and Visionary were the ones who actually went the extra mile and said, well it’s actually going to cost you this if you want your walls plastered, and you want carpet on the floor, and do you know what I mean? You want the finished project, as opposed to just a shell and then we’re out of here. You fit the bathroom; you do whatever else. They were the kind of, the clearest, in terms of the extra costs in terms of because we’d had the downstairs knocked through, we were going to need a demisting system for the fire regs, and only one other person mentioned it. And that person, basically, the only quote they got was the basic, cheapest model without actually, and when JP looked into it, there was far more to it with the fire regs. So, you’ve got to have, kind of, depending on the set out of your house, it’s anywhere between two grand and ten grand, but he’d actually looked into it and spent a lot of time getting the right quote for us and making sure we knew about that, didn’t he?

Female: He did get us a quote initially, and then I think it was about five grand, and then I think he went off and you know, without even being asked, he came back a couple of weeks later and said: “Actually, I’ve found someone who can do it for cheaper” and actually he could’ve, you know, he wasn’t paying, you know, he could’ve just passed on, we didn’t have a clue, but he actually continued looking for something that was actually cheaper for us. And there were loads of examples of them doing things like that. For example, we needed to have all the doors replaced on the first-floor landing because of the fire regs, to fire doors, and because all the doors were the wrong shape, and uneven sizes in an old house, we were talking at one point having to change the size of the doorframes, which would have been really expensive. And then a couple of weeks later, he came back and said: “Actually, I think what we can do is flip the doors over so they open on the other side, get the standard fire regs doors and just make them look like your Victorian doors, because I was a bit suspicious about how that was going to turn out, but actually it was brilliant, they looked really good. And obviously it was loads cheaper for us and less disruptive because it didn’t mean he had to rip all the doors apart.

Male: But most of this conversation was had before we’d even said yes to them. So, it was like they were going the extra mile, but also flagging ..and I know no one wants to hear about problems, but they were telling you what the problems were and how they were going to fix them, whereas I think, at least 2 of the other guys, it was just literally, we will turn up and we will build a loft and we will disappear and if there’s problems along the way, there’s problems along the way, and you find out as you go, which is what we discovered with other things, so …it was refreshing. Very refreshing.

Female: And we heard that from other people. Yeh.