CONSERVATORY BASE CHOICES

When planning the conservatory, we considered using a modular conservatory base system.

The system we looked into was the Durabase system which features a suspended floor which bolts onto the house and stands on concrete pads. It does remove the need for full scale footings so it would have saved the effort of removing the tonnes of topsoil!

The dwarf walls are built on galvanised steel frames with a genuine clay brick cladding on the outside and plaster on the inside. The brick cladding is already in place and everything is pre-pointed apart from the joins between sections which need the cladding bricks finishing on site. From the adverts and video we saw the system certainly looked very straight-forward, easy and quick to install.

For our size of conservatory (4m x 3m) we were quoted around £2500 for this system onto which we would have had to add a little for the concrete for the pads on which the base stands on, so in our case the cost was higher than having a bricklayer in.

In the end we decided to have a bricklayer to build a 'traditional' wall. He tells me that another advantage of having him do it is that if in the future we decided to have an extension instead of the conservatory, the existing wall could be extended upwards to 2 storeys high as the foundations will meet current building regulations for this.