Floorplan - ground floor

[TryingtoBuy2021]

Hello wise people - I saw a house today, within budget but top of our budget. The downstairs of the house doesn’t flow or work very well - they have extended but it still feels quite closed up and dark. It’s north facing. Wondering if anyone can have a look and see what they would suggest to improve this, it’s an Edwardian house. I’m reluctant to pay top of our budget for something that isn’t perfect but this house would give us much more living space than others in our budget.

Obvious change would be to open up between the kitchen and the skinny reception room, put the kitchen at the back of that new area and then have an open plan space next to the rear doors.

But I suspect that would require a large and expensive beam, to support what is presumably the original external wall. It’s one thing to add that when doing the extension, but quite another to go back and add it retrospectively.

Yes that’s what I’m thinking and I’m reluctant to pay too price for work done that I don’t think works for the house, and we can’t afford to redo it. So the search continues!

Ah thank you, those are interesting ideas. I think partly because it’s so much bigger than anything else I’ve looked at, I can’t see as easily how to furnish it. Amazed that you recognised it from the floorplan too and yes seems like a fab area.

You could also combine the three rooms on the left (kitchen and two rooms to the left), then put the kitchen either near the lounge or in the right hand corner. Likely to be less expensive as I think they might just be internal walls. If there are similar houses on the street you could look on zoopla to see what other people have done. An awkward layout might also merit a price reduction. If I bought it I would probably live with it for a while before deciding.

Have they got sky lights in the single story part of the extension?

I've never seen so many reception rooms!

the long skinny room could be good as a home gym / home office / store room / craft room if any of those are useful to you. then the rest of the space looks like it would be fine.

Yea the space really is massive. The utility room itself is the size of most box rooms!

I sometimes check out local listing and remember how strange the dining table placement was and went back to check!