Rooflights & skylights for Cheswick Green homes

Cheswick Green is a village of estate roads, and an estate house is often built with modest windows and a plain roofline. That makes the roof the place where most of the extra daylight can come from.

A roof window lights a room in a pitched roof. A sun tunnel borrows light for a hall or landing where no window will reach. Your written quote lays out whichever units suit the roof, so you can weigh them yourself.

Loft rooms under the slope of a village bungalow

In a chalet or dormer bungalow, the first floor under the slope is often a bedroom or a study with only a small gable window. A roof window set into the slope brings in more light than a gable window can, and it opens the room to the sky.

Because the floor of such a room sits low, a roof window can also serve as an escape route. Under Approved Document B, an escape window can serve only a storey rising no more than 4.5m from the ground, a height a bungalow roof room usually meets. We check the height of the sill, the position of the opening and the size of the clear gap at the survey, and we say what the window can and cannot be relied on for.

Our page on roof windows as a fire escape explains the rule in full, and our loft conversion roof windows page covers the layouts that suit a sloping ceiling.

Conservatory roofs that have run their course

A conservatory that has stood for a couple of decades usually shows its age in the roof first. Polycarbonate sheets that were fine when new turn dull and noisy in rain, and the room is hot in summer and cold in winter.

There are two ways to go. You can keep the base and the frame and replace the roof sheets with glass that has a solar control coating, or you can replace the roof with a solid insulated one and set a lantern or a flat rooflight into it for light. The glass roof keeps the room bright all through the day. The solid roof keeps the temperature steadier, and the lantern restores the daylight over the middle of the room.

We quote both when the structure allows. The frame has to carry the extra weight of glass, and we check that at the survey, as well as the state of the gutter and the wall plate. Our page on replacing a polycarbonate dome sets out how the sheet types differ.

Glass for a sunny back garden

Where a house has a south or west facing garden and little shade from trees, a rooflight at the back takes full sun for much of a summer afternoon. A clear double-glazed unit lets in the most light and the most heat. A solar control coating cuts the heat, at the price of a slightly cooler tint to the light.

A rooflight over a kitchen or a dining table is a place where the choice shows. The coating is cheap to specify at the start and expensive to add later, so we ask about the aspect of the room at the survey and put both glass types on the quote. Our page on solar control rooflight glass explains the coatings.

Who decides what

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council is the authority that makes the planning decisions for Cheswick Green. Cheswick Green is a village, and the council holds the planning records for every address in it, so any question about your house goes there.

Building Regulations are separate. In Building Regulations terms, forming a brand new roof opening is building work, and swapping out a whole rooflight, frame and glass included, is notifiable because it is a controlled fitting. On a notifiable job we send the Building Control notification ourselves, and the certificate comes once the job is signed off. A like-for-like change of only the sealed glass unit is outside the notification.

Sizing for a flat extension roof

A single-storey kitchen or dining extension on the back of a detached house usually has a flat roof, and its rooflight is chosen from the room outwards. A long, narrow kitchen suits a long flat rooflight over the worktop or two smaller ones set apart. A squarer family room can hold a lantern whose ridge sits over the table.

The roof covering matters just as much. If the extension roof is a single-ply membrane, a glass-reinforced plastic finish or felt, the new kerb has to be dressed into it properly. Adding the rooflight makes most sense when the roof is due a new covering, since the opening and the finish can then be done as a single job. Our guides on flat roof rooflights and roof lanterns show the shapes and the kerb details.