Can a rooflight be fitted to a bungalow?
Yes, and a bungalow is often the easiest building type to put daylight into. Every room has a roof directly above it, which is the opposite of a two storey house where only the upstairs rooms have that option. The constraint is not whether it can be done. It is what the roof is made of and how it is holding itself up.
Essex has a great deal of bungalow stock. Interwar and post war ribbon development along the arterial roads, the estuary settlements around Canvey, Benfleet and Jaywick, retirement developments through Rayleigh, Rochford and Frinton, and scattered chalet bungalows across the villages. They are not all the same roof, and the difference decides the job.
Why a single storey roof is usually straightforward
Three things make bungalow work easier than the same job on a house. The roof is low, so access is often a tower rather than a full scaffold, and materials go up and waste comes down without a long carry.
The ceiling is directly under the roof, so there is no shaft to build through a floor void and the internal lining is short. And the room below is normally a living space rather than an attic, which means the daylight lands where somebody actually wants it. A roof window in a bungalow living room does something a loft window in a house cannot, because nobody has to climb a staircase to benefit from it.
Trussed roofs, and the width they allow
This is the main constraint, and it applies to nearly every bungalow built from the nineteen sixties onwards. A trussed rafter roof is a set of engineered timber frames at six hundred centres, and the webs and the bottom chord are carrying load in tension and compression.
Cutting one is not the same as cutting a rafter. In practice this means the roof window is sized to fit between trusses, which usually holds the width to around five hundred and fifty millimetres unless a structural engineer designs a trimming solution. Two narrow windows side by side, spaced a truss apart, is very often the right answer where somebody pictured one wide one. The detail of that is set out on the trussed roof page.
Cut roofs on the older bungalows
Interwar and early post war bungalows, and anything with a proper attic room, usually have a traditional cut roof: purlins, rafters at four hundred or six hundred centres, and struts down to a load bearing wall.
That is far more forgiving. One or two rafters are cut back, the rafters either side are doubled to take the redistributed load, and trimmers go in at head and sill to close the opening. Widths of a metre or more are routine. The thing to watch is the purlin, because a rafter cut close to one changes how the load is travelling, and the position of the window often moves up or down the slope by a course or two to sit clear of it.
Ceiling height, and what a flat ceiling changes
Most bungalows have a flat ceiling with a loft above it, so a roof window in the slope does not look into the room. It looks into the loft. That is the detail people miss when they picture the finished result.
There are three ways through it. Build a lined shaft from the window down to the ceiling, which works well and is the usual answer where the loft depth is modest. Open the ceiling up into a vaulted or partly vaulted ceiling, which is a bigger job with structural and insulation implications and a striking result. Or use a sun tunnel, which is the small opening answer where the target is a bathroom or a hallway rather than a living room.
Hipped roofs, and where the unit lands
A great many Essex bungalows are hipped on all four sides, which is a shorter and more complicated set of slopes than a simple gable roof.
A hip means the slope narrows towards the corner, so a window has to sit clear of the hip rafter and clear of the eaves, and the usable area of the plane is smaller than it looks from the garden. Orientation then matters more than usual, because a hipped bungalow gives you a genuine choice of which way the glass faces. A north facing slope gives even shadowless light all day. A south or west slope over a small room collects a lot of afternoon gain and wants solar control glass rather than a larger unit.
Flat roofed additions, and the flush option
Bungalows accumulate flat roofed additions: a rear kitchen extension, a side utility, an integral garage, a porch. Those are usually the best daylight opportunity on the building.
A flush flat rooflight in that roof faces the whole dome of the sky rather than half of it, and because it is unshaded by the main roof it delivers a great deal for its size. The requirement is a proper kerb, an upstand of around one hundred and fifty millimetres from the finished surface, and a covering dressed up the sides of it. Where the addition is an older felt roof at the end of its life, doing the covering and the glass together is the sensible order.
Chalet bungalows, and the rooms already in the roof
A chalet bungalow already has accommodation in the roof space, which changes the picture entirely. The slope above a first floor bedroom is a straight roof window opportunity with no shaft to build.
The things to check are the position of the existing dormer if there is one, the height of the low eaves wall inside the room, and whether the ceiling follows the rafter line or has been dropped to a collar. A window set too high in a chalet slope gives light but no view out. Setting the bottom of the frame at around nine hundred millimetres above the finished floor gives a view from a chair, which is a very different room.
Canvey, the estuary and the low lying stock
The bungalows on Canvey and along the estuary have their own pattern. Shallow pitches, low eaves, exposure to wind driven rain off the water, and a lot of flat roofed additions from the sixties and seventies carrying original domed polycarbonate units.
Those domes are well past their working life, and the signs are consistent: a yellowed and brittle dome, daylight visible around the internal lining, or a damp mark on the ceiling near the kerb. A like for like replacement into an existing kerb is often a single day, and it is the moment to upgrade to a flush glazed unit and a better upstand while the opening is already there.
What to check before you enquire
Four answers narrow the field faster than any brochure. What is on the roof, what the pitch is, which way the slope faces, and whether the roof is trussed or cut. The last one is settled by putting your head through the loft hatch and looking for the diagonal webs.
Sunspire installs roof windows, flat rooflights, lanterns and sun tunnels on bungalows across Chelmsford and thirty miles of Essex around it, and handles the Building Control notification as part of the job. A photograph of the roof from outside, one of the loft from the hatch and one of the ceiling below is usually enough for a sensible range by email. The wider background sits on rooflight and skylight installation in Chelmsford.
Related questions
- Do rooflights need planning permission?
- Do I need building regulations approval for a rooflight?
- Who notifies building control about a rooflight?
- How much does a rooflight cost?
- Do rooflights add value to a house?
- Is a rooflight cheaper than a dormer?
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