small lean to or wow factor extension?

[aggyfurboots]

We need another bedroom and another public room to accomodate our growing family. We have a single storey cottage with an attic den (which has the best view when you stick your head out the velux!)

We plan to add a lean to style extension on to the side of the house using an existing bedroom as another public room which would have a dog leg hall off to the new bedrooms.

However this will mean we have 3 good size bedrooms and one really small. I wonder if we should do a 1 1/2 storey extension with a window in the gable end which would have fabulous veiws.

Down side would be the extra cost (we have money saved but once it is gone it is gone as it is redundancy money!) AND we would have to have help with it. The small extension we could do ourselves as have done similar before.

WWYD??

Thanks

I'd do a bigger extension but I'd wait until I had a job again so that the redundancy money became savings rather than survival money.

Dh has a job now. Redundancy was 3 years ago from a horribly stressful job. It was a bit of a life change for us because it came as a huge shock and made us re-evaluate what we wanted in life. We paid off a chunk of our mortgage with half the redundancy and dh now has a pt job he enjoys. I look after our 3 dc full time.

The small lean to would give us sufficient space and would be very cost effective but I can't help dreaming about beautiful things and having the wow factor iny life!! It wouldn't really be in keeping with our make and do plan but sometimes I think oh ffs life is too short! Give me the bloody x factor or wow factor or whatever you call it?!! Midlife crisis??

If you don't feel comfortable spending all your savings on giving your house some va-va-voom, maybe you could wait a couple of years until y our children are older and you felt comfortable taking on some work? The extension you're suggesting doesn't sound ideal - even if you end up building something yourself and not going the whole hog, it might be worth seeing if an architect or designer could come up with a better layout?

We did have an architect draw plans for an extension a few years back but he completely ignored our ideas and drew up his!! We got planning and then redundancy happened. I am so glad we didn't just do it because it wasn't what we had originally wanted at all. We had allowed the architect to persuade us his idea was best. This would have split our bedrooms with living space in middle with two bedrooms either side. What we want isn't ideal either but at least all bedtooms same side of house and it will flow better.