What You Need to Know About Flat Roof Extensions

Getting a Roof Extension

If you want to extend your home but don’t have the budget or need for a whole extra room or storey, a roof extension may be your answer. These roof extensions generally sit below the level of your home’s main roof, extending out like a verandah or patio. Depending on your budget and your vision, flat roof extensions can be used to create everything from an outdoor dining area to a smaller, fully functioning house extension.

Matching with Your Roof

Building a roof extension gives you a great chance to play with roof colours. The traditional route is to match the extension colour with your existing roof, but this is not a necessity. You could also get creative and create your extension in a different shade or a totally different colour to your original roof.

Get a Professional In

Whichever way you decide to go with that decision, it’s worth getting a professional designer or roofer in for help. They can guide you through decisions about colours, as well as whether to continue with the same roofing materials as the rest of your house or something different. If you go with metal roofing for your extension, find an expert who understands the Unicote range of pre-painted steel to help you choose the colour that will work best.

Explore Your Options

Your roof extension can be whatever you want it to be, within the bounds of physics and common law. Here are some ideas to get you inspired.

Roof Lanterns and Glass Ceilings

Talk to your architect about incorporating a roof lantern into your flat roof extension. These are day-lighting features that let in natural light, creating a sunroom during the day and an indoor stargazing palace at night. You can even choose to use coloured glass to create a unique feel to the room below during the day. Incorporating flat, reinforced glass or polycarbonate roofing into your extension is a cost-effective way to achieve similar results.

Embrace the Flat

Due to their angle, pitched roofs don’t offer many choices when it comes to what you do on top of them. Flat roofs, on the other hand, can become roof terraces, support art features or decorative plants, or they can even turn into balconies when you enlist a little extra help from an architect.

Gardens on the Roof

Assuming you can get the planning permissions you need, a flat roof extension can double as a unique garden bed! This is great for people with limited garden space, a green thumb obsession or those with ecological concerns. If you want to go down this road you’ll need to spend more to ensure the roof has the load-bearing capacity for that much soil and water. As long as your team knows about this from the beginning, they should be able to do it as economically as possible.

For high-quality roofing materials and expert advice, contact Rollsec today on 07 3041 4980 or make an online enquiry.