Taking on a project-is this too much for working family with young kids?!

[minimimo]

We have fallen in love with this gorgeous Edwardian house that needs a lot of work to create the layout we would want.

I have zero experience of doing work and have two young kids...are we mad to take this on?

I've attached the floor plan below-we would want to create a double reception by knocking through the reception room and current kitchen, then do a side return and knock through the utility and other reception room to make one big kitchen diner. Also upstairs we'd want to knock out a stud wall to make a big bathroom (losing one bedroom but that's fine-it has 6 and we only need 5)

Does anyone have any experience they can share about the cost and reality of doing this sort of work? I feel that I'm willing to endure a bit of pain in the short term to get our dream home...but I am also rather naive to this kind of thing!

Final issue is the price, we'd need to knock 10% off to be able to afford all the work, but it's been on a few months and seems a bit overpriced for the amount of work needed...

Dont know where you are in the country but if i wanted to do that in the SE i would be guesstimating £150,000.

It will cost a lot (150k isn't off the mark) and it will be majorly disruptive, dusty and difficult, especially with two children.
Trying to live round builders isn't impossible, but even little things can become a problem, like perhaps not having heating for a while if plumbing is being upgraded or altered, not having anywhere to cook a proper meal or do your washing. Then there is the problem of where to put all your possessions. We had a 6 month build and lived in one room for the duration, and we are retired. I wouldn't want to do it with kids.
Not trying to put you off or anything, but if you are going to spend all that money, wouldn't it be better to get somewhere that matches your ideal more, without having to chop the whole house around?

Thanks both, we are in London so I'm sure it will be about that much or even a little more.

You're right about the little things, I can imagine it being a total nightmare re washing/cooking etc-and yes I guess it would probably take 6 months wouldn't it..

If it was already done, it would be way out of our price range so wondering if it's worth the pain to get the dream forever home, or go for something finished but smaller that we would bed to move on from in a few years. It's so tricky!

It may be more doable if you did the work in stages? Although if you could afford to could you rent whilst getting the work done - would make it easier for the builders and quicker if you werent living in the house?

It wouldn’t have to be too disruptive. You could seal off the back of the house while doing the extension, and keep the original kitchen whilst the new kitchen was being done. That’s assuming the builders could access the back without going through the front .....

Aah @Joinourclub that's true-it's a semi and they could get in around the back! That gives me hope :-)

If you're willing to live with mess and chaos for longer than you anticipate it's perfectly doable with small children, particularly as other than the straightforward bathroom extension upstairs the upstairs is not being affected really.

However I would have a think again about your ground floor plans, doing the side return will be hugely expensive, you'll probably have to get party wall agreements in place etc (potential issues with new neighbours) and time consuming for very little extra space. You will have to remove a chimney breast by the looks of it and have a lot of steel to support that outside wall.

The rear reception room is a good size as it is, if you incorporated the utility room that would make a nice size kitchen/diner and then with the existing kitchen you could split that to be a study and a utility room or a utility room, downstairs loo and make the front reception a bit bigger. You would then be making the most of the existing space at a much lower cost.

I really liked the idea of a double reception room when I had a similar type of house but soon realised that the rear bit didn't really have a proper purpose and if I'd done it again I would have gone for a proper 'living room' at the front, I much preferred friends houses that had that.

On the first floor I would also consider instead of just enlarging the one bathroom making a smaller shower room & bigger bathroom side by side, easy with the plumbing and with that number of bedrooms would be useful to have another loo/shower on that floor.

We have been renovating/extending/self building our house since we bought it 3 & 1/2 years ago. We've saved a lot of labour costs, but it takes over your life. At the moment we have been DIY-ing most weekends and evenings since our builders finished in May (I now appreciate why it costs £7/8k to fit a new bathroom professionally - we did ours for about £2k including paying a plumber to install services to what was a bedroom, and second fit all the sanitary ware.) Yes I think it's worth it, we haven't yet had the house revalued but I would say we've added a significant amount of value, and now have a much larger house which works perfectly for us - there's no way we could have ever afforded to buy something like this at the beginning - or pay a team to do it all for us. It's a lot of graft, I sit here with sore, cut hands from sanding shelves all weekend, and my back hurts continuously. We have a 1yo DD so all our work is juggled around nap time and after she goes to bed. It does help that me and DH are both architects so we know what we're doing (in principal at least).