Commercial to Residential – Planning Permission Granted!

Welcome back to our blog! Last time, we explained about our maisonette renovations and we had just submitted a planning application to Bristol City Council (BCC). Now for the planning permission process!

Once we had submitted our application we had to complete a few additional items to validate our application. The first step is called validation and BCC will require certain documents to be included before they will start to consider an application. This can be different for each submission, depending on the project and probably the council too. In our example, we were required to produce a sustainability and strategy statement. After validation, there was a wait of around four weeks before we had a communication from BCC. At this point they wrote us an email to let us know of the reasons why our plan would not be accepted. This did not feel positive, however, we still had time to make changes, and during the next few weeks, we worked with the architect and BCC to update the plan to address the issues they had raised. We then submitted our updated plan to BCC and waited several more weeks for further communication. Due to their busy workload, we didn’t receive confirmation of their decision until the day before the deadline… A little nerve wracking! However, we are pleased to announce that we had planning permission GRANTED! We were absolutely delighted with this outcome as it was such a big milestone for us to start the project as planned. Look out for photos on our Facebook page of our new one bedroom flat https://www.facebook.com/solutionproperty/and our next big renovation blog.

Lessons Learnt?

The lesson that we leant from the planning process was that if you work with the council in an open reasonable way and be adaptive with your ideas and plans, they will consider your application in a positive way. It has been a challenge and a great learning experience!

Would we do it again?

The answer is ‘yes’ and we would consider larger projects next time.