Hi folks,

We're having to knock down our victorian garage and wash house before
they fall down, and we want to rebuild a longer and higher garage on
the same land.

Thing is, the way all the back yards have been designed the garages
for the immediately adjacent houses (this is a corner property) are
all 30m away from the houses and used to be joined together,
straddling the boundary between each house's land - ours and next
doors were built at the same time by the same builder.

The bloke who owns the first 3 houses to our left (ie 'round the
corner') demolished everything in the 3 back yards, so all that's left
of the immediately adjacent houses garage is 3 rows of bricks at roof
level still stuck to our garage wall - single skin bricks. We know
this because his land is blocked by a single large garage door that's
held up by wooden beams, one of which he managed to smash through into
our garage with, but that's another story.

The garage wall that's left (ours) marks the boundary. This pic shows
our garage (centre) and the adjacent land; the building you can see is
the old 1899 wash house:

http://vorbis.demon.co.uk/garage.jpg

The trench on the right also marks the boundary.

By reading old posts on here we know we can build without planning
permission as long as the garage is detached (check), has a less than
32sqm floor area (check), is less than 4m with a pitched roof (check)
and that the foundations for the higher double skin walls will be on
our land only (check).

However, a pitched roof will require guttering and we can't have
guttering hanging over his land so will we have to stick with a 3m
sloping roof like the one that's currently on the wash house?

Will we need building notices and have to give mr.next-door a month's
notice in writing? There won't be any issues with light blocking or
anything like that because of the distance involved between houses and
garages - that picture above was taken more than halfway down the
yard!

Any thoughs appreciated!

--
cheers,

witchy/binarydinosaurs