Move the basement room into the granny flat?

Hello everyone,

we are currently building a single-family house with a basement apartment.

Initially, our plan was as follows: You enter the basement via a staircase. There is an exterior entrance door in the basement. When you enter this door, you reach a kind of hallway. From this hallway, there is an entrance to the 3-room basement apartment and another entrance to the utility room.

However, since one of the apartment rooms could not be classified as a quiet/sleeping room due to its orientation, we relocated the door of this room to the "outside" towards the mentioned hallway and declared it as a cellar. Thus, it would only be a 2-room apartment and from the hallway you have 3 entrances: to the apartment, to the cellar, and to the utility room.

This is also how we submitted the building application, which was approved. Now, in hindsight, we think it would be more practical to move the door back into the apartment so that the room can be used as a 3rd room for hobbies, work, storage, or similar (not as a quiet/sleeping room). From a financial perspective, a 3-room apartment would be better than a 2-room apartment.

Could I move the door without any problems or would I have to apply for approval again? Getting approval would not be an issue, but I do not want to lose time since we are already behind schedule. And I also do not want to pay unnecessarily. It is practically just one door shifted by 2 meters, otherwise there is no change.

Thank you in advance.

Regards

In hindsight, we believe it would be more clever to reinstall the door to the granny flat, so that the room can be used as a 3rd room as a hobby room, workspace, storage room, or similar (not a quiet/sleeping room). From a financial perspective, a 3-room apartment would be better than a 2-room apartment.

However, a 3-room apartment is only a 3-room apartment if this 3rd room can also be used as appropriate living space.

Otherwise, I recommend providing a floor plan to take a look at it.

I have sketched it out.
It is about the red door.
Through the blue door, you enter the granny flat.
Is it still subject to approval to relocate the red door inward as sketched?

This room may certainly be used as living space. It may be a lounge, but not a sleeping or resting room. For example, I can imagine a study.

It may be a common room, just not a sleeping or resting room. For example, I could imagine a study room.

However, building regulations do not distinguish between resting rooms and sleeping rooms – either it is recognized as a common room or it is not. And legally, it is not clean for renting if you declare a room to be suitable for "working" but not for "sleeping." In principle, it is a storage room. In the worst case, as a landlord, you could end up in a situation you want to avoid. I assume that an appropriate window is missing. To assess something like this, the basement plan is needed and not just a sketch that omits not insignificant details. Regarding the question: since the door would be decisive for the granny flat, you would be building against the permit.

A sufficiently large window is also present. However, the orientation of the window was the only reason why it cannot be a rest/sleep room. The window of a sleeping room must be oriented away from the noise side, which was not possible due to the terrace, etc.

In fact, a distinction is made here between rest/sleep rooms and living rooms. Originally, the regulation applied to living rooms. This regulation has been relaxed to the extent that it now applies not to living rooms, but only to rest/sleep rooms.

Can you quote the § of the Landesbauordnung BW with which this distinction was made? I am not aware of any distinction between bedroom or living room. I think that perhaps one of the paragraphs below does not apply to your basement room and therefore cannot be used as living space, but probably only as a storage room.

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