The story of one man’s loft conversion has been shared widely on Sunday, after being highlighted in a national newspaper.
14:32, 31 Aug 2025Updated 07:34, 01 Sep 2025
UK households with loft conversions face £90,000 bill or having to ‘move home’
UK households with loft conversions face a £90,000 bill – but they can reduce it by THOUSANDS. The story of one man’s loft conversion has been shared widely on Sunday, after being highlighted in a national newspaper.
Experienced DIYer Justin Sparrowhawk was shocked by contractors’ prices – so he rolled up his sleeves and managed to cut the price from an eye-watering £90k to £27,000.
The dad, who lives in Worthing with his 12-year-old daughter, wanted to create a loft conversion to give her a more grown-up bedroom. “When I got the quotes in I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I know prices have gone up but with what they were asking for I might as well just have moved house.
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“We aren’t desperate for a fifth bedroom, it’s a luxury really, and I wasn’t going to remortgage the house to get it done.”
“We might as well move house,” he says. After he got to work, it took him three weeks to remodel the room and make some real progress.
He has spent £20,000 doing it himself so far. He suspects the whole project will come in at around £27,000, he told the Telegraph today.
“There is a lesson there – stick to what you know,” he says. “You have to make sure you know what you are doing, and understand the process,” he says. “Apart from that you don’t have to spend a fortune.
“All it takes is a bit of time.” He added how he hired a local roofing company and found his carpenter quite by chance in the local B&Q car park.
“He was there with his van so we got talking and I asked him to have a look,” says Sparrowhawk. “He had been working for someone else for ten years, been out on his own for a year, knew all the technical terms – and he immediately spotted the tricky parts of my drawings. He was a lucky find.”