House extensions in Cambourneand estate homes done properlyby a local Cambridgeshire builder

Working in Cambourne

Building work in Cambourne

Cambourne is a young town by Cambridgeshire standards, built out in three linked phases over the last twenty-five years: Great Cambourne, Lower Cambourne and Upper Cambourne. Most of the housing stock is modern estate build, brick and block cavity walls, trussed roofs, standard door and window openings, and plots that were sized tightly to fit as many homes as possible on each street. That combination matters when you're planning work here. Extending a modern semi or terrace in Cambourne is a different job from extending a Victorian house in St Neots: the structural openings are more predictable, but access down the side of the house is often narrower, and boundaries with neighbouring gardens sit close.

We see a steady run of rear single-storey extensions and kitchen-diner knock-throughs on the estate homes around Jeavons Lane, Sackville Way and the closes off Broad Street, where families have outgrown the original kitchen layout and want to open the back of the house onto the garden. Because most of these houses were built to a similar handful of house-type designs, we've a good working knowledge of where the load-bearing walls sit before we even open anything up, though every wall still gets checked properly on site rather than assumed.

Garages on the estate are often small, single, and used for storage rather than cars, which makes garage conversions a genuinely popular option in Cambourne, turning that space into a playroom, office or extra reception room without touching the footprint of the house or needing new foundations for most of it. Driveways and paths across the town were mostly finished to a standard developer spec, and a good number of homeowners are re-doing block paving or laying new patios once the original surface has worn or cracked after a decade or more of use.

Ground conditions around Cambourne are mixed clay over the underlying Gault clay bed common to this part of Cambridgeshire, which affects how foundations and drainage are set out for anything new, walls, extensions or patios. We work with what's actually in the ground on the day, checked properly, rather than guessing from what's typical two streets over.