M spec ramp to the rear door but not the front?

[epsilonGreedy]

I believe the preferred entrance to my house will be via the rear door due to the arrangement of the drive and location of the parking lot on the property. Internal routes within the house mean the rear door qualifies for wheelchair access and also a route to the downstairs toilet.

 

External ground gradients around the front door mean it would be an expensive pain in the neck to build an m-spec ramp to the front door.

 

Will I get Building Control sign off if only the rear door features an external access ramp?

[Ian]

@epsilonGreedy

there’s provision in the Regs for the situation you’ve described so it shouldn’t be a problem however I’d recommend discussing it with your  BCO first.

[Jeremy Harris]

Not a problem, it's exactly what I did.  I have stone steps up from the drive to the front door, but a gentle ramp that runs around to the back door.  I put in a wheelchair turning area outside the back door (just a section of double width path) to deal with the 90 deg turn needed to get in, but that's primarily because one of my friends is paraplegic and uses a chair.  For the same reason I fitted 33" wide doors everywhere inside the house, with flush thresholds.  My father was a wheelchair user, so knowing first hand how much of a nuisance seemingly minor things can be if you're using one, I thought it sensible to just make a few design changes to allow for it.  Who knows, it may well be that one of us needs to use a chair at some future date too, so it seemed daft not to try and make the house as easy to access as possible.

 

A side effect of the back door Part M compliant entrance and the ramp is that it makes moving the wheelie bins out a doddle, and if we need to put something heavy in one of them it's easy to just wheel it up to the space outside the back door, load it up, then put it back in the wheelie bin storage space, part way down the ramp and off to one side, behind the fence that holds out meter cabinet.

[nod]

1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

I believe the preferred entrance to my house will be via the rear door due to the arrangement of the drive and location of the parking lot on the property. Internal routes within the house mean the rear door qualifies for wheelchair access and also a route to the downstairs toilet.

 

External ground gradients around the front door mean it would be an expensive pain in the neck to build an m-spec ramp to the front door.

 

Will I get Building Control sign off if only the rear door features an external access ramp?

I’ve spoken to bc about this

And they were fine not having the front door as wheel chair access

[Hecateh]

Who defines which is the 'front' door.  

In the 18 years I have lived here less than 10 (I remember 3 and one of those was a drunk who was lost but that's a whole different story) people have come to the 'front' door.  From the only way the house can be approached you have to walk past the house, along the back (front) and up 12 or 13 stone steps. 

 

 

 

 

[HerbJ]

This is  fine - many of the big developers make the  secondary access   to meet the Part M Compliant access, so that they can have a grand front entrance.