What would you do - extension or fancy patio? Also - loft.

[littlepeas]

I'm going to do bullet points to prevent waffling - trying to decide what to do:

• Mid terrace 3 storey house - kitchen diner on ground floor, alongside a small sitting room (snug) and a study. Main sitting room is on the 1st floor.

• Kitchen/diner is an ok size - 6mx4m - plenty of room for a big dining table, but not for a sofa, etc.

• Garden is not very big. Currently have a horrible decked area that will either become extension or patio. It's about 1/5 of the whole garden BUT the rest of the garden is sloping and tricky, so if we extend there won't be anywhere for a table, etc in the garden.

Would you:

A - Add 5.5mx3m extension - bifolds and atrium - a bit like an orangery but the sides are walls. The kitchen and dining areas would stay as they are and the extension would be a downstairs sitting room - all open plan.

B - Don't extend but landscape the garden to create a really gorgeous outdoor room style patio/terrace and make the rest of the garden more useable (next door have stepped their garden and it looks amazing). We are prepared to spend quite a bit to make it really special.

Both options will involve a new kitchen. Total budget is £100K.

I can't decide whether it's better to have more room in the house - it's biggish, but not huge - about 2000 sq ft - the extension would add about 200 sq ft. I get a bit lonely when I'm cooking, as everyone sits upstairs! But then, we don't use the garden as much as we could as we don't have anywhere nice to sit. If we did the extension we wouldn't be able to afford the landscaping work for quite a while.

Second question - would you bother converting the loft if you already had 5 decent sized bedrooms and 3 floors? Another thing we're pondering. It would probably be a workspace/studio for me, but could be a bedroom if we sold the house.

You can easily build a patio on a sloped area. We did. They basically dig it out so the earth is flat, then build it up with a wall round it, fill it with aggregate and patio it, so you have a raised patio with steps going down to the ground

Personally I’d see if I could do both.

100k is a huge amount of money to invest in the garden, and you're unlikely to see a return. As @Bluntness100 has said, I'd see if you can set aside a small proportion of the extension money to create a flat area.

£100k for a patio??

I'm not sure if we can afford to do both at the moment - patio would probably have to be parked for a while. The garden slopes in 2 directions - very annoying!

Should have said - the extension also involves cutting down a very large and beautiful ceanothus, which I'm quite upset about.

£100k for whole project - so either extension and new kitchen, or garden landscaping/patio and new kitchen.

We're not too bothered about seeing a return - we have no plans to move, so we're doing the work for us to live in the house.

You will get a much better return on investment when you sell from an extension than landscaping. I would increase the floor area but with as much glass as possible to make it open to the garden.

Is there any scope to open up the downstairs more, the snug & study to the kitchen/diner, to give you the downstairs space without the extension?

For me, the loft would depend on how many people live there and what the other rooms are all used for.

I'd do the extension and some basic landscaping of the garden to enable another flat area to be created for a patio, but not the full landscaping if it's not affordable at the moment. Wouldn't do the loft as 5 bedrooms is more than enough and building regs/fire safety will probably be prohibitive especially with a large open plan kitchen, requiring a sprinkler system throughout the house if you go to 4 habitable floors

Also - we don't have to spend the whole budget - that's just what we have available to spend.

@Chasingsquirrels

Is there any scope to open up the downstairs more, the snug & study to the kitchen/diner, to give you the downstairs space without the extension?

For me, the loft would depend on how many people live there and what the other rooms are all used for.

Unfortunately not - the stairs are between the study and the kitchen and the downstairs loo is between the snug and the kitchen!

We have thought about knocking both snug and study into the hall and having a large entrance hall with zoning, but think it would be very tricky to do well, plus you'd walk straight into the house from the front door, which isn't ideal.

@muddledmidget

I'd do the extension and some basic landscaping of the garden to enable another flat area to be created for a patio, but not the full landscaping if it's not affordable at the moment. Wouldn't do the loft as 5 bedrooms is more than enough and building regs/fire safety will probably be prohibitive especially with a large open plan kitchen, requiring a sprinkler system throughout the house if you go to 4 habitable floors

Crikey! I didn't know that about fire regs. No to the loft then!

It’s not relevant that it slopes in two directions. A groundwork company will manage it easily, ours does and the patio is off the ground by four foot at one point, level with the ground at another.

I think if you extend and it’s an unusable garden space or shitty little decking area, you’re going to make it more difficult to sell. If you’re going to do it, I think you need to do both. It doesn’t need to be big, but a nice area to sit on outside is a huge selling point, and very usable in summer.

Tbh I hadn't considered that we could do everything at the same time - the extension and kitchen will take more or less the whole of the budget. We do have a bit more we could spend, but want to be careful not to go too mad!

Nobody so far has said it's not worth doing the extension!

It’s defintely worth doing the extension, a hundred grand on a patio and landscaping in a small garden is unimaginable. However doing an extension and leaving your garden with no patio area is a huge mistake. No one wants to walk out onto grass, and you need a nice sitting area.

If you don't plan to sell, do what will make you happy living in the house. Is that a landscaped and more usable garden, or is it an extension?
Also think about any children and how old they are, are they young (and therefore filling all available space with toys!) or will they be leaving home in the next few years?

It sounds like a house with a lot of internal space. I'm not sure I'd extend to get more living room space when you already have a snug on the same floor tbh! It's hard to know if it would actually encourage more people to sit downstairs or if they'd carry on in the living room upstairs.

I would do the garden instead but with a much smaller budget, and look at what you can do with the other downstairs room to make them more practical for you. But can't quite envisage floor plan to imagine it!

@Bluntness100

It’s defintely worth doing the extension, a hundred grand on a patio and landscaping in a small garden is unimaginable. However doing an extension and leaving your garden with no patio area is a huge mistake. No one wants to walk out onto grass, and you need a nice sitting area.

£100K is the total budget for the whole project, regardless of what we do, so would include a new kitchen as well - we probably wouldn't spend as much on garden+kitchen as we would on extension+kitchen.

I just want to point out again that we're not planning on spending £100K only on the garden - £100K is about what we'd expect to spend on the extension, including a new kitchen.

If we don't do the extension we will still have a new kitchen c.£40K and then not sure how much the garden would cost. We're not planning to spend £100K for the sake of it - I only mentioned this amount to give an idea of what we have to spend.

I would definitely do the downstairs extension and try to reserve some of the budget to do some basic landscaping so that you have a space to put a small table and chairs outside. Having a bigger living space where you can fit a sofa in downstairs, with good access to the garden, will change how you live. Then once you have seen how you use the garden you can do more work on it, if necessary in a few years.

hmm, if the loft is for a workspace studio for you, what will the snug, study and living space on 1st floor be?

if you creat a sofa/living space in the extension, one of the other spaces is going to become redundant. I would take over the snug as your room.

I would always say that spend the money on the house. In your case, could the end of the extension be bifold doors, eg half garden in the summer?

What you don't mention, apart from you being isolated when you're in the kitchen, is what is motivating you to look at extending and/or landscaping the garden. If you were to extend, could the first floor living room be used for something else?

Have you watched Love it or List it at all? Some really good examples there of what changes people made that a big difference and also of families who were thinking of spending large sums of money on loft conversions and extensions when they really just needed to have a clear out and rethink how they used the space and rooms they already had.

You don't need to spend £40k on a new kitchen either - we were quoted £30k for our kitchen but actually did it and a load of other work for a lot less.