To renovate without extending….

[TheMoodyOne]

We purchased a ‘doer upper’ house in 2021 with a long term goal to release money on the mortgage to extend the kitchen and create a large open plan kitchen with separate utility and downstairs bathroom. We’ve renovated every room in the house and now our fixed rate is coming to an end we need to decide whether to go ahead with the extension or just replace the kitchen. Quotes are coming in far higher than we thought and we’d probably not make the money back (we have no plans to move). We’d have to borrow more than we thought (plus use savings) which would obviously increase our monthly payments a lot ultimately impacting our lifestyle, holidays, days out etc. as the disposable income just wouldn’t be there!!

The issue is our kitchen is tiny (4x2.25m) and I’m really struggling to see how we could get a practical kitchen in such a small space. I’ve spent hours on instagram and Pinterest and too be honest it’s so depressing as everyone has huge open plan beautiful kitchens, even when I search for small galley kitchen inspo the big ones come up!!

What would you do….bite the bullet and extend or work with what we have? We’d also have to sacrifice the downstairs toilet if we ditched the extension and we currently have one small upstairs bathroom (family of 4, me, dh and 2 dds ages 3 and 5).

We bought our house because of the open plan room at the back - previously dining room, kitchen and then an extension behind them both. We live in here so my vote is to do the extension- does it have to be now, could you save for longer or cheaply replace anything in your current kitchen if it's broken? Downstairs loo is also a huge selling point. Eventually the house will be sold even if it's your forever home.

I'd maybe want to try to cut costs on the work where I could, but getting a bigger kitchen and downstairs toilet is always going to be worth it tbh. It's rubbish that it will mean you'll have to cut back on spending on fun things like holidays, but better living space is worth it because you'll be there fifty weeks of the year, if you see what I mean.

I would try to tighten my budget where I could but I'd definitely do the work. No downstairs loo and a cramped kitchen area bit of a pain to live with and not great selling points...

We dod a small extension to our kitchen and reconfigured the units and it has been fantastic. We have a small seating area, doors out to the garden and a decent sized table. We use it so much and it was well worth it.

It's a really hard decision, we looked at knocking down our conservatory (attached to our kitchen) to turn it into a proper part of the house so it could be the dining area, giving us more room to reconfigure our small kitchen.
Like you the quotes came in massively over what we were expecting... after we'd paid out for architect, SE and planning.
We also had the consideration of a drop in our quality of life to afford the change to our house and in the end decided that whilst I would love to have a bigger house, we didn't feel happy sacrificing holidays and general day to day luxuries just to have a bigger kitchen area.
But we are not really 'house people' or DIY people. So for us, the day to day ease/space increase wasn't worth not being able to have a meal out without worrying or book a family trip to London for a long weekend.
I think it just depends on your priorities, as others have said above, for them the change to the house was worth it and they would be happy to give up other things to achieve that.
For us, I didn't think we would feel happy enough with the additional space to not feel like we were missing out on having a good disposable income, so we didn't go ahead and so far we don't regret it but our second child is arriving this year so perhaps we'll feel differently in a few years time.
We did do a big clear out to give ourselves a bit more space and that helped make the kitchen feel a bit more manageable.

Years ago, in another house, we couldn't afford the extension we wanted, so we swapped round the large living room and the smaller kitchen.
We ended up with a large kitchen/living room space, with the Raeburn moved into that fireplace and windows at front and back, combined with a small cosy sitting room, with small fireplace. This worked well for the family because everyone wanted to be in the large room most of the time, but we had the small room for privacy and quiet.
We also managed to combine a downstairs loo with a cupboard to create a decent bathroom, because we didn’t want to drop the small bedroom upstairs.
I don't know if any of that resonates with you and what space you have available..

Thank you so much for your replies! I can see that it is very much personal choice on how much people are willing to sacrifice for extra space. I feel like I’m more with @jolota at the moment and I don’t want to sacrifice our nice lifestyle for years and years when our children are young and not go on holiday or have fun days out without worrying about money. But I’m also concerned that we will renovate the existing kitchen (which will also be expensive) and then regret it and always think what could have been!! There could be the potential to add a downstairs bathroom in the future but the kitchen will always be small.

We’ve spent £60k renovating the house and we’ve just had it valued at £40k more than we’ve paid for it so we are already £20k down! A £150k extension will not add anywhere near that to the value.

Ultimately I think the main issue is I have massive regret over moving to this house in the first place and the realisation that we totally underestimated a renovation property and it could never be what we hoped it would be!

We originally considered moving the kitchen into one of the sitting rooms/knocking through but wanted to keep a second separate space for the girls room and we’ve totally renovated that room so probably wouldn’t consider it now. I need small kitchen inspirations!

Can you post a floor plan? People on here seem to often be quite good at suggesting ways to rearrange things a bit to make the most of space.

So this is the floor plan. We are on a corner plot and have a lot of wasted space to the side (enough to build another house!) so the plan was to go out sideways by 4m to create a large kitchen diner and then down the side of the hallway to create a utility room off the kitchen and a shower room off the hallway.

I know the obvious thing would have been to knock the wall down between the kitchen and living room but we decided against that as we thought the side extension would be a better option. We have done too much work to the living room now for that to be an option.

Could you put a cloakroom under the highest part of the stairs and a side return extension only on the length of the kitchen? That would come in at a lot less than a full length extension and two additional rooms.

I can see why you're reluctant to spend any more on it, since you bought in 2021 when prices were high compared to now. Most houses have dipped in value in today's market. Plus you're not feeling the love for it either. I do think a kitchen extension and a ground floor loo would make it both more sellable and easier to live in, but if you'd rather hang on and perhaps move to a house you like better in the future, it might be better to cut your losses.

That's a really practical kitchen for cooking in.
If the issue is that you feel trapped away from the rest of the family while you are in there then you could cut a serving hatch through the wall into the living room and go for a "broken plan" effect. This wouldn't damage the living room decor very much but would obviously need some work but loads cheaper than an extension.

Alternatively you could have a good clear out of kitchen stuff and maybe move some things to be stored in the dining room, see if the washing machine and tumble drier can be moved upstairs somewhere so that you need less kitchen units. then you might be able to take the 1.5m closest to the end window to build some banquet seating and put a table there.

In order to make the kitchen bigger you may be able to move the wall at the bottom of the kitchen so it lines up with the end wall of the dining room and you could move the external door down to make more space for a longer run of cabinets. Not ideal but you would then have an eat in kitchen.

Also, is there a possibility of squeezing an extra loo in upstairs?

It really is a tough decision and I think its also hard to get into the mindset that whichever choices you make you need to find a way to feel positive and happy about them in the end.
What's your priority with the kitchen? Do you want to maximise floor space? Do you want space to fit an eating area in? Do you want to not feel separated whilst cooking?
We use a toddler table & chairs to eat our dinner at in our living room/diner, my husband and I sit on cushions (but he comes from a culture where this is normal) + we have a folding table & chairs stored in the conservatory which we move around when we have guests over to eat (which is not often).
My parents house has a hatch between kitchen/living space which works quite well for them.
We do a lot of batch cooking and have a folding 'kitchen helper' so our daughter can be in the kitchen and involved when we're cooking but it does take up a lot of space when she's using it.

I definitely want to try and incorporate some kind of seating area into the kitchen. Somewhere small would be fine like a breakfast bar end or similar as we have a dining table in the rear sitting room. I also want a dishwasher and for it to not feel cramped dark and dingy!

we were thinking of turning under the stairs into a utility area with a stacked washing machine and tumble dryer accessible from the kitchen. There’s no room for anything extra upstairs it’s just a standard 3 bedroom house with a small bathroom and landing. It’s a 130s semi with solid walls that are not easy (or cheap) to move!

All the images I’m looking at of ‘small kitchens’ where I think the layout could work there’s never any measurements and they always look so much bigger or the kitchen part is small but it’s part of a bigger room.

Our kitchen currently in a really bad way, we’ve lived with it for 4 years and it’s really getting me down and now the mortgage needs renewing I feel now is the time to decide what to do. The oven is broken, we have a tiny fridge freezer, it’s mouldy around the window so whatever we do will be a full refurb rip out, new windows doors etc.

A small seating area like this would be lovely but to me this kitchen looks so much longer than 4 meters! I quite like the door at the end of the kitchen that could possibly give us a little bit more length but then I’ve always wanted the sink to be looking over the garden!

where do you start with a new kitchen? Would we get a kitchen planner in to try and help us visualise the space and layout of how it could be.

The cupboards are probably a relatively standard size? How many cupboards does it have compared to your kitchen?
I think you can go to most kitchen companies and get plans drawn up for free.
My parents did this when they redid their kitchen, but they said some were really useless and had no idea about design/functionality they just had basic software but it does help visualise. They ended up using the plans from one company with a cheaper company.

The pic looks like 7 units. So if they are each 60cm then that would be 4.2m and then a breakfast bar on the end.

Start by thinking about what appliances need to stay in the kitchen and how many/ big ovens you want. It is possible to buy a double under counter oven which fit in 60cm. There are also drawers you can get which fit into the kickboards for oven trays.

Then think about how many storage cupboards you have at the moment. Do you need them all? Could they be organised better? Can you get rid of aunty Flo's special Christmas crockery that you never use. How many drawers do you want?

Then draw a scale plan of the room. Normal sized units are 60 x 60cm see how many you can fit in. You can also get other sizes.

Or you can just go to somewhere like b and q and get them to make something and see what they come up with.

I'd be swapping the dining room to the living room so you have the current living room and kitchen together, knock through then use that as the family space with kitchen, dining room and add soft seats so can be an all in one.

This'll be cheaper than an extension as that's about 3k ish per square meter and stuff like bricks are through the roof cost wise.

There's a planning tool on DIY kitchens that you can have a play around with. We did an extension last year with a new kitchen and fitted 10 in at Christmas and it was fabulous.

We use the front room that is the dining room on the plan as the living room and the living room on the plan as a dining room/playroom/ office/ living room!! We won’t knock the wall down as we’ve spent too much money renovating that room everything has been ripped out and replaced.

I think we’ve decided we aren’t ready to completely give up on our extension plans and we are going to spend a bit of money on updating the appliances and flooring in the current kitchen, give everything a coat of paint and live with it for a couple more years, cut back on lifestyle to save and see where we are when the new fixed rate ends. I’m hoping I’ll be back in full time work by then as the girls will be older and dh is hoping for promotion so maybe now is not the right time.

It makes me sad at how much we underestimated the costs and stress of a renovation. We are going into our fourth year now and I’m exhausted from it all so maybe a break will be for the best.

Moving isn’t an option, we love the location and houses are very rarely on the market here, it’s the type of place where people live until they die, all the houses need work and I’d never do a renovation again.

I really appreciate everyone’s advice!

Hi there! I'm a journalist with ITV News -- I was just wondering whether you'd be up for a chat about your fixed rate mortgage coming to an end? We are looking to find someone who can speak about this for an upcoming news piece we are doing. Please DM me or email me on [email protected] if you are interested in having an off the record chat. Thanks!