Downstairs bathroom off kitchen

[siluria]

Hi all. Apologies for long post!

My husband and I bought a house last year which we love - it's the middle of three Victorian houses that used to be two-up two-downs before they had extensions. Downstairs it has a really big open plan living room/dining room, an extension with a 15 x 9 foot kitchen in it, a little lobby with a door to the garden (there's also a door to the garden from the living room), and a small (4 x 6) downstairs loo/utility room.

The first floor used to have just two double bedrooms in it - front and back. But the back bedroom (which would be about 13 x 12) has been converted into a large bathroom and a landing area with the boiler in it and bookshelves. There's now also a fully-kitted out loft-conversion with proper staircase etc, and that room (which is our bedroom) is 17' x 12'. The front bedroom, also 13 x 12, is the same as it has always been, I guess. So we have two bedrooms and an upstairs bathroom + landing.

My husband has been offered his absolute dream job much closer to London, where I already work (I commute there - 1.5 hour commute each way and we have a 20-month-old DD and another baby on the way). There's no way he can pass this up as the opportunity just won't come around again. We can't rent the house (we'd lose £400 a month on the mortgage alone) and have 0% equity. When we were planning on staying, we always wanted to convert the house to 3 bedrooms, but had complicated renovation plans which would have been expensive and time-consuming.

So we have a quicker plan now for adding equity: simply to turn the downstairs loo/utility AND the little lobby area into a bathroom which would come directly off the kitchen (apparently it used to be this way - this would make the bathroom 8x6). And take out the upstairs bathroom, knock down the partition wall between it and the landing area, and thereby reinstate the lost bedroom. This would mean we had 3 double bedrooms and a downstairs bathroom off the kitchen. This is by far the cheapest option and we think it would add at least £20k to the value of the house, meaning we could sell, cover moving costs, and have a small sum left over to bank and begin saving for a new deposit. (We'll go into rented.)

My question is: does this sound like a sensible trade-off? All the rooms will be really good sizes, and I know downstairs bathrooms are pretty common in Victorian terraces of this layout, but downstairs bathrooms off the kitchen - how much of a drawback would that be to you if you loved everything else about a house? It's possible we could leave a toilet/sink ensuite in the back bedroom - would that make a difference?

[siluria]

Thanks everyone - loads of good advice here. lilliangish on the relative value of character 2-bed vs 3-bed properties in our area (with/without downstairs bathrooms) - but totally agree with you (I've said many times on this thread that this is a guess and that we would NEVER do any work without seeing a wide range of estate agents from the local area - I'm just trying to get general reactions to the idea before we get the proper, specific, local advice we need).

Can't compare normal properties on our street - there are our three Victorian terraces, then a few large Tudor properties, then some 1980s/1990s new builds, then a school, then a small 1960s block of flats, then some more Tudor properties, etc etc.

Sounds like the far better plan would be to try to find a way of squeezing in a single bedroom and keeping a bathroom upstairs. Need an architect for that though as we're all out of ideas on how to rework the space. There's plenty of it, it just seems to be problematic.

[siluria]

Sorry, I'm making this on the basis of comparable properties. There's a much smaller 3 bed house with a downstairs bathroom (not off kitchen) for sale in our road for £35k more than we bought ours for. It's only just gone on the market though so I don't know how much it will sell for or whether that's a realistic price - and it has a bigger garden. But overall, 3 bedroom houses even with downstairs bathrooms fetch a much higher premium round here than 2 - opens up a different market (the family market) and it's a large village with loads of family amenities.

Still, like you say, at the moment this is conjecture and we can't proceed until we have some hard facts.

[noddyholder]

No!

[LadyKooKoo]

Can you load a floorplan of the house? Perhaps from when you bought it. Some idea on what to do might come up then.

[siluria]

I have made a floor plan on a floor planning tool but don't know how to upload it to MN?

Annoyingly when we bought the house when you clicked on 'floor plan' on the particulars it just gave you more pictures of the house. And the details are all archived on Zoopla now for anyone to see but it's the same problem there, so I can't link to it.

[siluria]

Okay, final plan of the night, having just spent 2 hours walking round the house with DH.

We could put in a shower room upstairs, which would be internal so have no windows. This would leave us with a bedroom which would be about 8 x 6, so quite small. We could possibly squeeze a small bath into the downstairs loo/utility if we moved the door, leaving the lobby intact. We definitely need a bath somewhere. What we'd end up with is two very small bathrooms - one on each floor, one with a bath and one with a shower. Plus two double bedrooms and the 8 x 6 room.

Obviously we need to find out if the amount we'd pay out for all this would be likely to be recouped in resale value.

But, presuming it was, does this sound like a better layout to you (2 doubles, a good-sized single, and 2 small bathrooms) than what we have now (2 doubles, a large bathroom and a downstairs loo)?

Thanks for all your input and honesty :)

[IwishIwasmoreorganised]

On paper it does sound better.

Ds1 has a small bedroom. He has his cabin bed (so there's toy storage underneath) then about a 2 foot gap across to a pax wardrobe and a chest of drawers and that's it! Works well as a bedroom, not for playing in.

I think you'll have to get quotes and advice from local EA's. They know the market and what people are looking for.

Good luck OP!

[ArbitraryUsername]

It doesn't sound like a huge house, so I don't think anyone would be surprised that it had a small bathroom. Two small bathrooms would be a bonus.

[chartreuse]

If I were you I'd consult an architect, they are trained to see the possibilities for your house in a way that might not occur to you. A friend is an architect who specialises in helping people make the most of their space and she is brilliant at it.

[Contradictionincarnate]

I live in Victorian terrace with just downstairs bathroom as extended kitchen ...it was a big deciding factor and something that kept me up at night thinking could we cope with it. ensuite loo and sink would make all the difference if its a family home it wouldn't matter. quite so much if one bedroom wasn't a double but room enough for childs bed and things.

[fatnfrumpy]

We are in the process of renovating a victorian property.
At present there is a downstairs bathroom accessed from the kitchen. The toilet is seperate from the bathroom. We have had an architect draw plans (cost £350) to open it up into a large bathroom by removing two walls. However although the architect drew it like that the builder has said building regs won't sign it off unless there are two doors from the kitchen! AAHHH!
We are also putting in a seperate shower room/toilet upstairs between bed 1 and 2, pinching space from both rooms.
Bed 3 access is gained via bed 2 which is not ideal so we plan to remove a chimney breast to make a corridor so that all three bedrooms have their own private door!
Why is it that when you spend £££ to improve a house you have these wird rules to follow?
And why did our architect not know about the two door rules. Which is present the bathroom is laid out now!

[fatnfrumpy]

Weird rules!

[PureQuintessence]

No way.

Imagine waking up in the night feeling sick, and having to get down to the bathroom, through the kitchen, to be sick.

Imagine one or two more children sick with the winter vomiting bug.

Or just a 5 year old needing a wee in the night, and hesitant to go all the way downstairs, will either not make it, wet their bed, or wake up mum or dad to take then down to the toilet.

It is a BAD BAD idea.


Leave the house as it is, and let potential buyers decide what they want! They might love it the way it is! Or have their own plans for the utility/lobby area.

[Tizwozliz]

Fatnfrumpy - your builder needs to get up to date. The rule regarding two doors from toilet to kitchen is no longer applicable in a domestic setting.

[siluria]

fatnfrumpy sack your builder! He's wrong - those rules no longer apply and they haven't done for some time. You don't need two doors. That's for definite.

Good idea about the architect - we're about to do that very thing.

purequintessence you might not have seen that your sentiments are exactly those of almost everybody else on this thread, so I have seen the light and changed my mind. No downstairs bathroom for us. Very grateful for the honest feedback. We're now (loosely) planning to put a bathroom in our big unusable landing area (it will be internal, but we can feed light tubes through the loft/old water tank closet), and turn our large bathroom (it's 12' x 6'6" at the longest part and 8' x 6'6" in the smallest) into a child's bedroom. But we have three estate agents coming on Thursday to talk through the options.

There is no way we can leave the house as it is though - we bought it 6 months ago for £195k (anybody can see this on the internet and see all the details on Zoopla) and we owe £198k. We need to improve it to even break even (we're happy just to do that if it comes to it) - and even, I think, to make it saleable, since people are going to know we bought it recently and that we must be desperate to move if we're selling it so quickly. And they'll know we haven't done anything to it as they can see the pictures!

There is also a lot of wasted space in the layout which is hard to describe - it's one of the reasons we bought the house, because it's obvious that you could do more with it layout-wise than it has (we just now don't want to spend thousands and thousands on a house we're going to leave).

[jammybean]

I don't mean to be negative. But I still find it hard to see how your magically going to add 20k to the value overnight. From experience the few properties I've seen on zoopla where the vendor has tried to flip it on often at a vast overinflated amount by simply putting in a new kitchen/bathroom, have failed to sell.

At worst you could be left with the cost of renovation and a house that's been on the market months with no reasonable offers.

[MooncupGoddess]

Your new plan sounds more sensible, though £20k increase in value is rather ambitious.

I'm surprised you managed to get a 102% mortgage last year... I thought they were very much things of the past.

[PureQuintessence]

I still worry that you are about to spend a lot of money that you wont recuperate.

You have a good reason to sell though, your husband has been offered a job in London.

However, would it not be a better idea to see if you can change your mortgage to an interest only buy to let mortgage, and get tenants in?

£195 k wont get you much in London at all.

[MooncupGoddess]

In her OP she says 'We can't rent the house (we'd lose £400 a month on the mortgage alone) and have 0% equity.'

[ILikeBirds]

Interest only buy to let with no equity is unlikely but then I would have said the same about the current mortgage ltv ratio

[PureQuintessence]

I read the op. OP however does not specify if she has investigated other mortgage options. On different terms, the rent might cover the repayments. Which means Op could keep her house, and rent in London, or buy in London. Them getting another mortgage for themselves should be fine, as the current mortgage, if changed to buy to let on a tenanted property would not be based on their salaries but on rental yield.

[pooka]

I'd turn the back bedroom into a single and use the remaining space for a smaller bathroom.

So you seem to be saying that the bedroom would have been 13x12. In which case, a 13x7 bedroom and a 13x5 bathroom, incorporating boiler.

I would not look at a house with downstairs bathroom off kitchen.

[MooncupGoddess]

With no equity though I can't see what other mortgage options she has. Surely she'd need at least 20% deposit to convert to a buy to let. Presumably she has a high mortgate rate for the same reason... lenders are no longer naive about the risks of negative equity.

[LillianGish]

I agree jammybean. You are trying to second guess what a buyer might want which is impossible - even for an estate agent I dare say, it just depends who comes along. My feeling would be you bought the house as it is not long ago, so presumably it appealed to you. Whoever buys it will have their own ideas of what they prefer - two small bathrooms, bathroom downstairs, leave it as it is or the expensive and complicate conversion plan you had in mind - I can't see the point throwing more money at it when the whole point is that you are already out of pocket. Why don't you put it on the market and see who bites?

[pooka]

We have a sunpipe in our internal shower room. It's amazing!

But if you are developing the property a la property ladder, I don't think you are likely to recoup the cost of the unit and installation. My brother lives in a flat with internal bathroom (beautiful 1940s block, original layout) and gets by just fine with clever lighting.