Help!Your opinion needed: redo kitchen or extend?

[BookishKitten]

Hi, fellow Mumsnetters, newbie here with a pressing dilemma!

I’m a mum of an 11-month old baby, live with my husband and my widowed Mother (who has come over to help me for a few months with the baby, as I commute long hours for work).
We live in a 3-bed 1960s semi, in the southeast of England, near Newbury, with a small kitchen facing the street (not too close as there is a front garden), and which is separate from the living space - this is where we have our meals, as the kitchen is too small for a table.

We’ve recently discovered that there is a leak in the kitchen which has ruined the kitchen floor & some of the cabinets, plus the wall to the front of the house has a growing damp stain too (lovely welcome-home sight...!).

As we wait for the insurance company specialists to come round for a look, we’re pondering options and I’d like to hear your thoughts, please! :)

We can either redo the kitchen or extend at the back, where the living room is located, as we have a pretty good size garden. Extend would imply probably knocking down a detached single garage (used for storage).
There’s about 4K in a savings account for a rainy day.

My question is should we
A) play it financially safe and just redo the kitchen & keep having meals in the living/dining room
B) extend to the back with a single traditional style extension
C) extend at the back with a single storey kitchen orangery (something like this www.valegardenhouses.co.uk/kitchen-conservatories-and-orangeries.html)

My biggest worries are

• financial cost: we are due to renegotiate mortgage in 2-3 months, so should we take a bigger mortgage when the cost of childcare is so high, Brexit predictions so gloomy, and the possibility of going part-time because of the baby?
• impact on everyday life: with a baby and a long commute, how long would an extension take to be completed?

Any questions, suggestions, comments etc are very welcome!
If you’ve been in a similar position could you share your experience?
I know very little about real costs of architects, builds, etc
A huge thanks in advance!

Do you have a floor plan with dimensions?

If you did extend what would you use your current kitchen for? How would you access the new kitchen extension?

How much money would you have available for the extension? £4k is nowhere near enough to even get started.

Hi, greenwhitefrog!

Thanks for getting back to me :)
The 4K are actually just earmarked to get the project started (I was thinking architect’s fees & planning permission paperwork - is this a realistic figure?).
Here is the floor plan - the red bit is the single detached garage.

I would use the current kitchen as a utility room (laundry & ironing) plus adding a downstairs cloakroom at a later stage, as the plumbing is already in place.

The kitchen would then be accessed by the corridor which exists at the moment and which would continue in a straight line - this would steal some space from the current living room but we actually have a dining table there, so no worries.

The extension? / orangery? would project sideways (2 metres on the current living room) and forwards (another 3 m), along the length of the current living room (5 m).

The end result would be like this

The new kitchen in blue
The new corridor in green
The old garage in red

(Apologies for the quality of the sketch, I’m doing this with one hand and a baby on my other arm...)

What do you think?
Cheers!

Tbh I'm not sure that would 'flow' very well, you'd lose quite a bit of space to the new 'corridor' and the living room could lose natural light. It would also be a little odd in terms of layout to have a utility at the front of the house like that.

The kitchen is actually a reasonable size for that style of house so I wonder whether the cheapest/compromise option (depending on whether the wall between the current kitchen and the living room is load bearing) would be to move that wall and take c1m from the living room - I think that would give you sufficient space to have a table in the kitchen so then you'd have a kitchen diner and still retain a good size living room.

If you later wanted to put an extension on then you still could and then use the front room as a snug/adult living room or family room.

Alternatively if you wanted to do the extension I think you should look at opening up the rear of the house to the extension so it's all one big light room, maybe make the front room a snug/adult living room/family room and the 'wrap around' bit could be a utility room and WC.

Yes I think £4K would be fine for that, it's pretty straightforward so you wouldn't necessarily need an architect, architectural technicians and building surveyors can prepare plans sufficient for planning/building control. You may be able to do an extension under permitted development rather than requiring full planning.

If you just moved the kitchen wall then (unless it's structural) that would be c£1-£2k for demolishing/building new wall/plastering etc and then the insurance money could refit the kitchen so you wouldn't need to remortgage.

Thank you so so much for that greenwhitefrog!

Ou sound super knowledgeable - have you done this before?

Do you think that the living room might look off balance if I take 1m for the kitchen? There is currently a chimney breast with wood burner on the left wall of the living room (it’s in the floor plan in black).

How would you go about doing the rejig of the kitchen as you suggested? Contact a builder first or think about kitchen layout first? What if the wall is load bearing (I don’t know, are there signs I can look out for?) - is it still feasible to move the wall?

Fingers crossed - the plumbers from British Gas are coming tomorrow!

Thanks in advance for your input- I’m already envisioning an alternative!

I think pp is right re the rejig and stealing space, and you'd basically be straightening the livingroom off in line with the narrower bit

Pondering (ok, I'm procrastinating!), if you did extend I think I would do something like this. Turn kitchen plus 1m from living room if possible (wall doesn't seem to line up with bedroom above so may not be supporting) in to a second livingroom. This has the advantage that it can also be a bedroom - you've technically just become a 3/4 bedroom which can be helpful.

Then do your extension at the back, but open up as PP said. The side return bit becomes your utility, possibly with the WC off it or in under stair cupboard. Then the remaining big room becomes your kitchen/dining/family room, with the front room as an adult space.

How much money could you/ would you be prepared to add to the mortgage? Because you're talking different orders of magnitude. If it's 15k, don't extend.

We also have a fireplace in our living room and we rejected all ideas that would leave the living room asymmetrical around it. If you don't love your fireplace, removing it might give you flexibility, especially if the chimney is external so you could easily get back to flat wall. Losing the fireplace was not an option for us.

Personally I'd be keeping that 4k as contingency, not eating into it with architects' fees etc.

What a great idea, StatisticallyChallenged!
I can see how this would work well.
I guess I’m struggling with the whole spatial design/ flow aspect of the project. I come from a EU country where rooms are much bigger and layouts tend to flow off one main hallway/ corridor. And I’ve never lived in a 1960s house!

I really appreciate the time you and the PP took to think about this (and even designed a floorplan !!!)

What % of your property value is mortgage? Is it your forever home?

We did an extension last year, smaller than yours but included a new kitchen - around £40k all in. Actual extension didn't take too long - a month or so, but took another 2.5 to get kitchen installed. Very disruptive but absolutely worth it.

We owned around 50% of our home before remortgaging so could afford to add a bit and we are staying here long term. Don't totally stretch yourselves but you're at home a lot with young children and the space is amazing.

I like a pp's floorplan and would use extra room as a playroom.

Hi, AnemoneAnemone!

Thanks for reading through the thread!
How much to borrow is a bone of contention. My husband clearly doesn’t like the idea, whereas I would go ahead if times were not so uncertain.
We’ve paid off about 36k off our mortgage and there is a ceiling price in the area for a 3 bed that is roughly in the area of our mortgage plus 40k, so I guess it would make sense not to over borrow.

The issue is that since my initial post I’ve been doing some extensive reading (freaking out daydreaming) and I saw that I would need a lot more than 40k to build the kitchen extension plus utility and cloakroom, as per StatisticallyChallenged post.
I’ve used a good online calculator for this I found at www.homebuilding.co.uk/extension-cost-calculator/?utm_source=content&utm_medium=link%20text&utm_campaign=ecc#tool

It’s a dilemma. The kitchen as it stands is awful, just an example: when the door opens the handle hits the hob, I’ve burned myself twice already because of that and I’m worried about a child being in a hazardous kitchen
My husband does very little cooking and I don’t think he realises how difficult it makes life now, let alone when our child grows up a bit more...!

Any advice/ questions/ suggestions welcome, please! :)

Hi, 2rachtint! Thanks for this!

We currently stand at 73% still mortgage to be paid off - we only bought 3 years ago (as 1st-time buyers) and it’s expensive in the southeast :(

We’re committed to staying here for the long term - I feel fed up of moving around and so does my husband (who is in his mid forties). The area is nice, there are nice schools and we have a big garden (that’s also a work in progress).

It’s just the impractical kitchen layout and separate dining area that is causing issues, really...

Ok so have you still got quite a high LTV? If so it might be a bit early to be taking much out in a remortgage for my taste. People do it though.

Thinking along the lines of what you currently have, the door could be easily solved. An old-fashioned bifold might work well, or hang it to open outwards, or just take off its hinges (possibly a fire risk?) and see if you like it. We've had great success knocking out an old storecupboard and putting the fridge in that space. It made much better use of the space. Or alternatively those tall larder cupboards with individual pullout drawers hold an amazing amount. I think eating in the kitchen would be tricky but you might be able to squeeze in a bit of breakfast bar. At the most basic, just a section of the worktop without a unit underneath (or with a shallow unit recessed under) could work for feeding a child. A friend just plonked a toddler table in the middle of her kitchen. It worked well for a few years while they were little.

The obvious thing from the outside is lose the units along the right hand wall (hob) but run units on the left hand wall. That gets you some awkward corners but a U shaped kitchen is common and you'd get a bit more in. You might even have space for highchair/ feeding children where the hob is currently.

What we did with a similar dilemma was pay an independent designer to come up with something blue-sky. The usual high street designers were too stuck to the previous design, which we were desperate to change. We decided against the extension, just reworked what we had.

You can definitely get a very workable kitchen in that space - mine is smaller, a bit over 10 by 8, and works very well but I had some seriously shit designs done before I ended up doing it myself. I wouldn't try to make it an eat in though. I'd knock out the store cupboard and do a u shape personally with hob opposite door. I probably would do an actual cooker/small range rather than separate hob and eye level oven as if you did a u shape the natural place for tall units would be at the ends i.e. beside the door which would not be a good oven spot