Garden sacrifice????

[mylittlemonkey]

We have a 3 storey townhouse we have been trying to sell for 3 and half years!!! but cant. Its a lovely house and area and we really love our neightbours so we are thinking of extending instead but it would mean taking up at least a third of the garden if not more to make enough room to make the extension worth it. We have a 15 month old DS and would like another in not too distant future and worry that they will want a big garden to play in. Am i going to regret reducing the garden down to approx 4.5 meters by 6.5???

How big are your gardens? And if anyone has one around this size do you wish you and your kids had a bigger one?

I had a 40ft garden (12.mtrs approx) and I felt that was too small with one DS. However I did live near a park and opposite a huge (approx 1 acre) field that the kids could play on so wasn't so bad.

I like a big garden though, it is one of the top things on my tick list when looking at houses.

have a look at the neighboring houses and see whether they have been extended. If they have not, then I would avoid it. The garden seems small enough already. You have to consider that a larger house with a very small garden will really only appeal to young profs renting. how much will resale matter to you, are you planning to move again in a few years?
You say that you cannot sell, could you rent?
You don't give a lot of history about your attempts to sell. Did you drop the price, declutter, stage?
What is holding back a sale?
You also need more information from local estate agents as to how much value an extension would add to your house and building costs. The disparity in these might make it worth dropping your price and trying again to sell.
Good luck!

We're in a similar situation. Currently our garden is 9mx9m. We want to extension our kitchen by adding a 3mx5m extension (3m out from back of house). The extension would give us a lively big kitchen/diner/family room. I'm not 100% sure because of the amount of garden it will take up. We have a drain in our garden so we'd either have to build out unto the drain which is 2m leaving an internal space of 1.6m x 5m or built past the drain which is 3x5. Even though the kitchen would look amazing I just can't get past the garden issue. Most of our neighbours with same size garden have 3x3 conservatories/extensions so its looking like what we'll end up doing.

Sorry about mistakes - typing on Phone!