"Lobster" wrote in message Did you
submit full plans for this work at the start ? If so surely all
these plans showed things like windows, ventilation and the like,
and the
BCO should have accepted/rejected these things then, not now.

No, did it under a building notice. I'd been led to believe by the
architect who was advising us at the time that this would be fine
since there would be no need for retrospectively applying the
regulations as it was an old property; the building notice therefore
referred to the reinstatement of the two original properties from one,
with specific mention of the two or three specific items which needed
BCO approval (we thought) - new doorways, new kitchen and bathroom in
one house etc. With hindsight, the full plans route would have been
better (and it might have been appropriate for the BCO to point that
out at the point of submission IMHO!)

Why? How is the BCO supposed to know what you didn't include on the
building notice? She's only doing her job if she then tells you to put
right things you didn't mention that come within her remit. I wouldn't
expect her to spot things she's not looking for (or you haven't done
yet) on each visit. Hence you get the constant dripfeed of
instructions to put thing right. Come clean now with everything else
you haven't told her about and life will be a lot easier.

Come clean with what exactly? I'm hiding nothing. The point is I'd
been led to believe that I wasn't going to have to update the
properties to modern buildings standards, therefore I only included
things in the building notice that I thought needed mentioning, as
listed above. I'd have thought that if that was wrong, then the fact
that I also included "conversion of one property into two" might have
been a big red flag for Building Control to say "Oi!" at the outset
(or maybe after the first 3 or 4 visits?) if they disagreed with this.

The commencement meeting with your BCO when he walks around with you going
through the list of jobs on the plan you supply with a building notice would
normally catch most of the missed things on the list, and also things you
may have put on that don't need to be. But a building notice submission
does make you fully responsible for meeting the regs, not him.

Unfortunately as we see even on this group, different people interpret those
regs very differently.