Classic Victorian end terrace here. Living room at the front. Dark middle reception room currently houses a very scruffy kitchen, rapidly being unusable. Narrow room at the back, extended into a lean-to. This is currently a generic 'junk' room/home office, and its proportions (5.6m x 2.8m)/location are more suited to a kitchen than anything else.
Options...
- Work with what we've got. There's space for a galley-type kitchen as you walk into the back room, and maybe a very tiny dining table in the lean-to at the end, with french doors onto the garden. Pretty cramped for a four-bed house, but cost-effective, right?!
- Knock down the lean-to, replace with a glass box type setup with room for a proper dining table, bifolds onto the garden etc etc. Hooray, we have a proper dining kitchen! Plus two nicely proportioned, separate reception rooms - i.e. a formal living room and a study/playroom. But is this super expensive without actually adding much space? And does the galley style kitchen still feel cramped?
- Side return extension, the kitchen-diner-bifold-garden dream. But then - what to do with that middle reception room? We don't particularly like knocking through the front two reception rooms - think the proportions/2 x fireplaces looks weird, and half always ends up underused. Join on the middle reception room to the extension as a study/play area? Or leave the original wall and window and try and get light in somehow? Is the cost of this project worth it when you end up sacrificing a separate playroom/study/second reception room?
I know there's a gazillion of these threads but would LOVE to hear your stories and how you weighed up the different pros and cons, what you would definitely recommend - and, of course, how much it cost (cue screaming emojis). We're in SE London, so expecting this to be hefty (maybe being on the end terrace with side access help?! Wishful thinking?!) but on balance could be worth it for somewhere we can live in for years?
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