Extra bedroom or kitchen diner?

[Enchancia]

Hi, hoping for some thoughts on a couple of questions...We are going to do some work to our house this year. Knocking down wall between existing (small-ish) kitchen and dining room is a definite. Then we need to decide between either a loft conversion (to create extra bedroom) or extension to back of house to make the kitchen/diner into a bigger space to include family type room. Can't afford to do both (now at any rate - maybe in 5/10 years time would have saved up enough to do whichever we don't do now) and can't decide which would be better (not really in terms of which adds most value to the house, but which would be more useful to us).

My two specific questions are:-

(1) at what age do children typically want really want their own bedroom? We have 2DDs close in age who currently share. Loft conversion would mean they could have their own rooms. Just wondering at what age we're going to start getting pleas for their own space, eg to do homework in etc. (They are pre-school age now).

(2) those of you with kitchen/diners, do you have sofas in them, and if so does this work well / what sort of size space do you think you need to comfortably fit sofa? The new kitchen/diner (without extension) should be a decent size for an eat-in kitchen but think sofa may make it look crowded, hence wondering about the extension to put seating area in. We do have a separate sitting room at front of house, but thinking that as DC grow older we may want two 'living areas' so they could have some privacy with their friends over etc.

Any thoughts very welcome on which you'd do! Thanks so much.

If you're knocking a wall down to make the kitchen bigger anyway does it need really the further extension? Could you have long church pews with big cushions to act as both cosy seating area but also dining space? Would there be a lot of dead space if you extended the kitchen?

Our boys share a room and are 8 and 7, we're moving to give them separate rooms because they wake each other up and sit chatting at night which wakes up the whole house! However my sister and I shared a room until she went to secondary school at 11, I was 9.

Thanks - yes we could do benches/cushions, that's a good idea actually to save space if we don't do extension. I guess I was just thinking of somewhere that would be proper alternative to sit and relax if DDs were in tv room with friends and not sure benches would cut it for a whole evening! From your experience on bedrooms we probably have 5 years at least before the extra bedroom is 'needed', so maybe it's worth doing extension now and loft in a few years' time.... Food for thought, thanks!