Extension

[Fifiona291]

We bought a 3 bed semi a few months ago and cannot decide what extension to do first.

1. We have twins and want to give both boys their own room currently they share. You can see from the plan our third room is quite small. We will do a loft conversion and make 1-2 rooms hopefully.

2. I would also like a bigger kitchen area. Not sure whether to knock through the kitchen and dining room and extend with another family room at the back in a few years or keep as it is until we extend and put the kitchen at the back when we extend. I would like to move the toilet to open up the hallway and I would love a utility room too.

So my questions are: How would you design the downstairs ? WWhat extension swould you do first?

We have a similar layout to you but no downstairs loo. Our plan is to extend across the back (full width of the house) and make the extension a kitchen-diner. Then convert the existing kitchen into a loo (opening into the hall) and utility room (opening into the kitchen). This appears to be the easiest way to extend and keep costs down in terms of where pipe work and so on will be.

The existing “dining room” (the dining end of a living-dining room for us) will become a play area and we’ll have glass doors to partition off the sitting room at the front.

If money were no object, we’d be making it bigger, putting the kitchen where the current dining room is and knocking through the existing kitchen/dining room wall. And maybe wedging a utility between the new kitchen and the living room wall. But that would probably involve removal of chimney breasts and the infrastructure of piping, etc, would also be more complicated.

I have thought about this quite a lot.

What you want to avoid is the current dining room becoming a thoroughfare to the extension at the back.

If I had your layout I’d think seriously about knocking down that wall between the kitchen and dining room - we haven’t because we don’t have the wall between the living and dining room but the bigger eating space would make a big difference for us.