Skylights and rooflights in Sutton Valence

The through-lounge

Knock the front and back rooms into one and you have a through-lounge: glass at both ends, and a long stretch of floor between them with no window of its own. Where a wall once divided the front room from the back, taking the wall out gives a bright room at either end and a dim middle, usually where the sofa and the television sit. A rooflight is only an option if there is roof above that middle. In a bungalow or a house with a single-storey part, a roof window or a flat-roof rooflight can light the middle section directly. In a two-storey house, the room above intervenes, so the answer may be a light shaft or a change at the landing.

The landing

Stairs and landings in older Kent houses often sit in the centre of the plan, away from the outside walls. The landing at the top is then a corridor lit by borrowed light through bedroom doors. Daylight comes down the stairwell and reaches both the landing and the stair itself if the window sits right over it. The position depends on where the stair rises and where the rafters fall, and we trace both from the loft on the day of the survey.

Ridge-top sites also mean open sky. The land falls away towards the Weald, and a roof slope facing south or west will see long hours of sun, so the choice of glazing and blinds is worth discussing with the unit. A north-facing rear slope gives an even light all day and little heat. The view from a roof window is worth planning for too. The outlook over the Weald is a reason to choose a window that opens and sits at a height you can see out of from a chair, and the sill height is set against where the bed or the sofa will stand. On a south-facing slope, an external blind or solar-control glass keeps summer heat down without losing the winter light.

The dining room

A dining room that has been opened through to a kitchen can end up as an inner room, with its outside wall now part of a corridor or a utility. Eating, homework and the post need decent daylight, and a rooflight over the table end of the room brings it in without moving a wall. Ceiling height and the roof above it settle which kind of unit goes in. The candidates are a flat rooflight, a tube-type sun tunnel and a roof window, and each has its limits.

The conservation area

There is a conservation area named Sutton Valence. The boundary is drawn on a map, and the council's own record shows whether a given address lies inside it. What the area changes is the attention paid to what can be seen from the street, so the slope and the profile of the unit become the main questions. Our conservation area guide goes through the options, and the Article 4 page explains the direction.

Ragstone, tile and the roof underneath

Ragstone is a wall material and says little about the roof. The roofs on top of walls like these are often clay tile, with timbers underneath that may be old and irregular. A roof window needs a clear bay of the right width between two rafters, and where the existing spacing does not give one, new trimmers are fixed to carry the cut ends. We measure that from the loft before we price, because it decides which standard sizes can go in without altering the structure.

Older roofs can sag a little, and a window set into one has to follow the line of the slope. The trimming timbers go in square to the rafters, and the flashing is dressed to suit the tile, so a neat result depends on careful measuring more than on the product catalogue. A sloping, hand-made tile roof also needs its flashing fitted piece by piece, and we allow for that time on the written quote.

Almshouses, Georgian houses and listed buildings

William Lambe founded six almshouses in the village with an orchard and gardens, and Eylesden is a Georgian house in the village. Older buildings like these may be listed, and a listed house will almost always need listed building consent for a new or altered roof window. How an application is put together is in the listed buildings guide.

A hole in the roof brings the Building Regulations in. We handle the Building Control notification where the work is notifiable, as the Building Regulations guide describes.

Domesday records a church of St Mary at Sudtone, possibly built of wood about 1070, and the Town Mill, a smock mill from about 1720, adds another landmark. Houses on a ridge site often stand at different heights at the front and the back, so the roof can be a longer reach from the garden than from the road. Access for the glass, the scaffold and the old tiles is worked out around that, and it is one of the lines on the quote.

Choosing between a roof window, a flat rooflight and a lantern

For a pitched roof over a landing or a bedroom, a roof window is the neat answer: it sits in the plane of the slope and opens to let air through. A flat rooflight suits a flat roof over a rear extension or a dining room, and a roof lantern suits a bigger flat roof where height is available inside. A lantern on a flat roof normally rises beyond the 150 mm limit, and the roof lantern planning guide covers where that leaves the application.

The right choice often turns on what you want from the room. A through-lounge wants light spread along its length, perhaps two or three small units. A landing wants a single window above the stairwell. A dining room wants a patch of brightness over where people sit. We draw up the options at the survey and set each out in the written quote. Our flat roof rooflights page and the roof windows page show the products.

The nearest station is Headcorn, on the South Eastern Main Line, and a drive from the village over the A274 reaches it. Neighbouring villages we also cover include Kingswood, Headcorn and Staplehurst, each with its own housing.