Following on from my loft hatch joist cutting posts (cheers for all the
help - it's in the hands of the structural engineer now and I've ordered a
new SDS drill - wahey!! :-) )... and on a completely unrelated matter...

Basically our flat (upstairs, terraced job) currently has an internal rear
staircase (eating up 30% of our kitchen) leading out to the back yard, i.e.
the door to the rear yard is downstairs. We want to move this door to
upstairs to increase the floor area of our kitchen and basically 'bolt' a
steel fire escape onto the back of the house.

Now, we're limited with how much space we've got in the back yard and would
like the staircase to consist of a single flight. We've had some rough
plans drawn up by some steel fabricators but I have a couple of concerns...

1. The angle of the dangle (sorry, erm... the pitch) is clearly 45 degrees
on their drawing and building regs reckons 42 degrees is the highest pitch
you can have.

2. The rise would appear to be 250mm, but again looking at the building
regs document 220mm would seem the be the max rise.

The steel fabricators said they put staircases like this in all the time and
have never had any problems with building regs, so am I missing something
here? ...and does it make any difference that this isn't the main entrance
to the flat, which is obviously at the front of the house?

....and what about blocks of flats where you only have one entrance anyway?
....and what about buildings that just seem to have retractable ladders
bolted to the backs of them?

I'll be drawing the plans up this weekend in preparation of having a chat
with planning, but what's the crack with building regs? As far as I can
gather I have the option of a 'full plans' submission, which will take about
5 weeks, or a 'building notice' which will take 48 hours, but they might say
no... after it's been fabricated... which wouldn't be good. What happens if
I just don't involve building regs? Do I just (!) run the risk of them
spotting it later down the line and forcing me to rip it all down?

Cheers again,

Andy
STILL haven't started ANY renovation and getting slightly impatient now!
:-)