I'm modernising a nice, but slightly shabby, 1930s 3-bed terrace with my husband - the fairly standard thirties layout with a very small galley kitchen, but relatively spacious and bright living room and reception room (as attached).
We've just spent 15k on redoing the bathroom (to a v high standard) and changing the boiler to a combi. While we need to decorate all rooms in the house, and luckily the electrics are not too old / don't need to be redone and not any big issues to deal with per the survey (we need to change the downpipes outside and other bits but no big work that we are aware of currently).
We have a budget of up to 100k to do all of our immediate work over the next year or so. We had assumed we'd do a rear extension at the back and create a large kitchen diner. The kitchen is the one thing that is difficult to live with - as really tiny and badly laid out - so we'd like to get this done relatively soon if we can (but know it is difficult at the moment).
But we've been revisiting this assumption that an extension is necessarily the right way forward - given how much costs are spiralling at the moment. We are in London (outer zones) and it seems prices are around £3k per sq metre without kitchen and costs keep on rising. It may take most or all of our 100k to do the downstairs extension with a half-decent kitchen. That seems ludicrous for what we want and we wouldn't make that money back in the short term (other houses on the street with basic extension plus loft conversion are going for about 100k more than we paid for ours - with better spec, perhaps 150k more).
We could alternatively do a knock through kitchen and reception and make a kitchen/diner that way. We've got a small bricked toilet outhouse joined to our kitchen that could potentially be transformed into a utility for a washing machine and dryer (would need some work / insulation etc to meet regs) and space to have a small downstairs loo under the stairs. I'm guessing (although not costed) that we could do this for under / around half of what it would cost for an extension. If this is the case, I'm struggling to think what the extension really gives us for the extra money other than a more spacious kitchen. Is that worth it?
We are not planning on moving anytime soon - at least a 5-10 year house - but we've not had children yet and priorities/circumstances can change (we're hoping to have one or two children over next few years). We'd like to do a nice master bedroom loft conversion with ensuite in a few years' time but not a priority right now. If we can keep our spending down, we could do a lot more with that money - overpay mortgage, spend on nicer materials/furniture/kitchen, or invest. So we want to make sure we don't just do the extension because it is the "done" thing to do for these properties.
Is an extension really that much better than knocking through the wall between the kitchen and reception and making a smaller (but still heaps better than it currently is!) kitchen/diner? Any one made a similar decision and how did it go? Any ideas on cost for knock through and other modifications?