Weekend Essay: Home improvement and the politics of delay

How has your 2026 been so far? For me, my main activities at the start of this year have been squeezing around cardboard boxes, trying not to get in the way of workmen, and constantly brushing plaster dust off my clothes.

Yep, it’s home improvement time. Specifically, a loft conversion to extend our rather pokey London flat and make it feel a bit less like a shoebox.

Such a scheme wasn’t exactly top of my bucket list, especially with a newborn to deal with. But given my ever-expanding family and ever-shrinking living space, it was a necessary step. As my brother often says, if you’ve got to swallow a frog there’s no point staring at it.

(The alternative was to move house, which would have been a) more expensive, b) more stressful and c) logistically impossible given that we can’t agree on an alternative location.)

The journey from conception to completion has been a bureaucratic rollercoaster to rival HS2 or Hinkley Point C

I don’t want to turn this column into a pity party. The construction itself has been pretty smooth, with unfailingly polite and efficient contractors and only minor complaints from the neighbours (ameliorated by biscuits and mince pies).

Indeed, the whole project has not been nearly as disruptive as I feared. In fact, we managed to make the flat feel quite Christmassy over the festive break, the stacks of junk notwithstanding.

And, of course, the end result will be two extra bedrooms and a spare bathroom, lots of study space for WFH days, a new room for our baby, and a much larger room for our two-year-old. He, for one, looks excited by the new staircase that’s magically appeared.

Not much to complain about, you may think.

Sadly, this is only the final chapter in a long and frustrating journey. Our home, as an ex-council flat, is a leasehold property, which means that the journey from conception to completion has been a bureaucratic rollercoaster to rival HS2 or Hinkley Point C.

Every single stage took months of emails, phone calls and increasingly frustrated queries

It could be worse, of course. The fact that our council owns the freehold means we don’t have the escalating ground rent that has bedevilled many leasehold property owners (although some of the service charges have been questionable).

Nonetheless, getting this project off the ground has been a test of our sanity.

First, we had to apply to purchase the loft space. Then we had to secure planning permission. Then we had to get Permission to Alter, leading to Consent in Principle. Once that was in place, we could complete the loft purchase, which would turn the Consent in Principle into actual consent.

All this being done, we had to register the new lease, with the loft space demised to us, with the Land Registry, which would then allow us to complete the remortgage (thus giving us the cash to fund the loft conversion).

Are you keeping up? We certainly struggled to do so, especially as every single stage outlined above took months of emails, phone calls and increasingly frustrated queries. Nothing was smooth and everything seemed unnecessarily drawn out.

I’m beginning to appreciate how infrastructure projects can easily spiral given the right/wrong circumstances

Even paying for the loft purchase was a nightmare. Convincing the relevant parties that we weren’t simply trying to launder money involved an intricate series of ID checks and cash-trail verifications that would have made MI5 proud.

Not only was this dispiriting, but it had a noticeable effect on the bottom line.

Hidden costs lurked everywhere, ready to spring forth at unexpected moments. I mentioned HS2 earlier, and I’m beginning to appreciate how infrastructure projects can easily spiral given the right/wrong circumstances (admittedly, not from £40bn to £80bn in our case).

Fortunately, we’d watched enough episodes of Grand Designs to allow for considerable overspill in our budget. I wasn’t going to be one of those suckers shovelling cement in the rain while living in a caravan. But even with our precautions, it’s going be a lean 2026.

“What on earth did you expect?” you may say. And it’s true that stress, delays and paperwork are baked into projects such as this. There was never a time (except maybe the Stone Age) when home improvement was anything other than a massive headache.

Let’s not forget that financial services are replete with complaints about delays, blockages and miniature frustrations

But it does make me wonder: is our experience a small indication of why things seem so stalled in this country? If the government’s home-building programme encounters anything like the obstacles we’ve had to deal with, it’s no surprise that things are moving at a snail’s pace.

And let’s not forget that financial services are replete with complaints about delays, blockages and miniature frustrations. For every digital innovation, it seems, there’s a demand for a wet signature or an arcane procedure worthy of Bleak House.

I understand that demands for ‘a bonfire of red tape’ are rarely straightforward. “There’s a simple solution to everything, and it’s usually wrong,” as the phrase goes. But if we want a more dynamic and innovative society, we can surely do better than this?