Snodland skylights and rooflights

A town that grew in two bursts

Paper-making came to the town around 1740, when the May family built a mill that the Hook family took over in 1854. The Medway Valley railway opened on 18 June 1856, and the village trebled in size between 1861 and 1881. Housing put up for mill and railway households in a rush like that is often terraced. A terrace of that age is usually narrow: a street-facing parlour, a middle room behind it, then a small back addition. We read each house when we arrive.

What we can describe is how the layout behaves once it has been altered. The middle room often takes its light from a window onto a side passage or a yard, and a kitchen extension on the back leaves that window looking at new brickwork. The middle of the plan then becomes the darkest part of the house, however well the front and the garden are lit.

The stairwell and the landing

The stairwell is a shaft with a wall on each side and a door at the foot. The landing at the top has the same trouble: it runs between two bedrooms, so no outside wall touches it. A roof window cut into the back slope over the stairs can light both, provided the loft leaves room for a lined light well between the roof and the ceiling below. Where the rafters or the loft floor get in the way, a sun tunnel offers a second route, because its tube needs a smaller opening in the roof than a window does.

Either way, daylight arrives at the top of the stairs and works its way down, so the hall at the bottom brightens as well. It is a quiet change, and nothing about the front of the house alters.

The middle room after an extension

When a flat-roofed extension has been built across the back, the old middle room sits against it with a wall where its window used to be. The roof of the extension is the part nobody sees from the street, and it is where the missing daylight can be put back. A flat rooflight set near the line of the old back wall lights the new space and throws some of its glow into the middle room through the opening between them. If the extension is deep, a lantern over its centre does the same job at a larger scale.

Getting the work in

Where a terrace has no side passage, every tool and every pane has to come through the front door. We agree with you beforehand how the hall, the stair carpet and the floors will be covered. At the end of the day the loft hatch is closed, the dust sheets come up and the landing is left tidy, with the ceiling lining ready for paint. The ceiling lining round the shaft is plastered and left ready for decoration. On a terrace the unit usually goes on the back slope, so the street front keeps its roofline.

When the house has a listing

The listed buildings people think of first in Snodland are the big ones: All Saints Church, a Grade I building with 12th-century origins, and Woodlands Farmhouse on Constitution Hill, a Grade II* building from the early to mid 15th century. A listing can also sit on an ordinary-looking house or outbuilding, and it changes the route completely. How listed building consent works is set out in our listed buildings guide. If you are unsure whether your property is listed, give us the address and we find out before we price anything.

Conservation areas near the town

Conservation areas near the town include one named Snodland and one named Holborough Mill, Snodland. Standing inside one does not on its own remove the right to fit a rooflight; only an Article 4 direction does that, and our Article 4 guide covers how to find out. Where an application is needed, the council tends to look closely at the slope the unit faces and how it sits among the tiles, so we record both at the survey. We check your own address against the council's records.

Rights that may have been taken away

Newer houses in the town may have been built with a condition on their planning permission that removed permitted development. Nothing on the outside of the building shows it. The conditions are recorded in the house's planning history, and we read that history before we promise anything to anyone about whether an application is needed.

Stairs, lofts and the way out

Anyone lighting a stairwell from above is often thinking about the loft too. On a two-storey house, a loft conversion creates a storey more than 4.5 m above the ground, and the usual answer there is a protected escape route down the stairs. The escape rules are summarised in the Building Regulations guide, and the page on Part L and rooflights covers the energy standard the glazing has to meet. We handle the Building Control notification where the work is notifiable.

What the roof build decides

A garden building roof is made from different layers than a house roof, and its build-up decides how a unit is fixed and how the upstand is formed. At the survey we check the deck, the insulation above or below it and the falls, and the written quote then names the product and the size. A lantern usually stands more than 150 mm proud of a flat roof, so on a house it normally falls outside permitted development; our lantern planning guide explains where that leaves you. Low-profile units on a flat roof are an easier conversation.

Outbuildings have a different standing in the rules from the house itself, so wording written for houses does not simply carry across. We tell you what applies once we have seen the building.

Air as well as light

A glazed room in summer collects heat under its roof. If the garden room is used for work or for guests, an opening rooflight lets warm air out through the top, and the electric opening rooflights can be raised from a wall switch or a handset. We discuss whether that suits the room when we see how it is used.

Shapes that suit a small room

A room of a few square metres needs less glass than people expect, because light from overhead falls straight down instead of raking in from one side. A single square or rectangular unit over the desk or the reading chair is often all it takes, and the position is marked on the ceiling at the survey so you can see where the patch of daylight will land. Bigger garden rooms with a ceiling that can be opened up to the rafters suit a lantern, where the glass walls of the lantern bring light in from several angles.

Booking the survey

The survey is free and comes before any price. After it you receive a fixed written quote, and you get our 10-year workmanship guarantee on paper once the job is finished. Message us on WhatsApp at 07880 284133. The form further down works too, as does info@orchardskylightsmaidstone.co.uk. Halling lies just up the valley and Larkfield just to the south, and we survey in Halling and Larkfield too.