Layout plan- please help!!

[newyorky09]

Sorry in advance if this seems confusing but I am so stuck about what to do with the layout of my downstairs. My husband and I have been talking about it for years and just going round in circles so any advice would be much appreciated! We were due to start an extension at the start of lockdown but postponed it and now the extra time in the house has made us rethink our plans again.
So we currently have a knocked through lounge and dining room which we really like as it is a lovely open room with original flooring etc. Then we have a separate kitchen which is a good size but we wanted a kitchen diner and we have an old conservatory that will need replacing in next few years. I’ve put up our present layout as ‘now’. We started off wanting a new extension which would give us the following:

• downstairs Toilet
• nice kitchen diner with views of garden but doesn’t have to be massive
• keeping the lounge dining room as we like this room
• utility (but doesn’t seem possible with out also extending to the side which we can’t afford)

The architect then drew up the first plan as below but we couldn’t get planning permission for extending back 5m. He said it wouldn’t work going back 4m.

So we agreed on the second plan which is all open plan except for a small lounge. We’ve been rethinking this though as: the lounge would be very small; we’d lose the large lounge dining room which we really like; not sure if we really want open plan living as husband a chef and does a lot of cooking (small home business). But then open plan would look great and be lovely space.

So now we are thinking should we:

• add small utility at the back of the open plan kitchen diner in the plan we have
• revert back to original plan 1 (although only going out 4m) not bother with the island And have a smaller kitchen diner perhaps with french doors. This would be approx 5.7 x 4m in size. Would that be big enough for kitchen diner with a small table?

Sorry again for the rambling post- this is driving me mad! Any advice or other suggestions we’ve not thought of would be really appreciated! Thanks!

Your plan 2 is basically my planned extension. We are going out 4 metres and the width will be about 5.8m. We are having the study as the utility area and family area will have a tv and sofas. We are quite happy with the design but did toy for quite a while about putting the kitchen in the family area, that seems to be preferred by a lot of people. But we have a nice fireplace that we really want to keep and I like cooking and doing dishes in the light and hate our current dark kitchen. Our family watches a lot of tv so it is nice to have no glare in the family area.

I think it will be very much down to your own personal preference. Good luck.

That’s interesting @mothergooseinthenorthwest are you having the utility as a separate room that leads into the kitchen?

@newyorky09 hi there. No not a separate room but part of the kitchen with a big utility cupboard. So we will have the same open look as yours with all the structural work. From the door to the hallway, we will have: cloaks cupboard, utility cupboard, pantry and then the pillar the steel beam will rest on that divides the area from the kitchen. The difference is that we don’t have a side door there. Hope that makes sense. The compromise is that we don’t have a ‘room’ to dry clothes. We will see how much it bothers us, if too much, we will move utility upstairs in a few years time.

It was so very interesting to see your ideas so similar to ours and we also thought about going out five metres or extend to the side and have a wrap around. Plan 2 is what we settled on after looking at the costs and trying out different layout.

Also reassuring that we both struggled to find place for the utility. A couple more ideas I came across are,1) slide a utility in between the front room and dinning room. 2) block up the door from your study to the hall way, reduce the size of the study and make it a small utility and the rest part of kitchen. Hope that helps. We are due to start this November. Fingers crossed!