OPEN PLAN LIVING

[CrispsnDips]

Would anyone want to share their photos of how they have created one big space, ie: kitchen, diner, lounge? I would love some ideas about how you separate the areas by placing rugs/positioning furniture, etc

also, how does it work? Is it infuriating having everyone together, ie. not being able to escape to the kitchen, for instance?

I have seen a fabulous property on the market - there is a separate snug but we would have to use that as a bedroom as there are only three smallish bedrooms and we have two teenagers who have been used to bigger bedrooms

cheers 😃

Yes we would definitely build a garden room - I can use it in the daytime as I WFH and it can be used as a separate space for the teens in the evening.

think my husband would be busy as he needs to build a huge shed for garden tools, bikes, etc but Hey Ho he loves having projects …(part of the reason for moving as he’s done everything in our current home, nothing else to do)

I don’t think kitchen/living space is a goer if you don’t have a separate sitting room. It also needs really huge rooms to work well, this is the case with many of the online images as they are often not in the UK. I don’t even like it in flats and it means that most 1 bed flats are only 2 rooms now, basically a bedroom and a kitchen, we’ve lost all that space because builders can get away with it.

We are all open plan, but it's a big L shape. On the thinner side of the L is the kitchen, on the right angle is the dining 'room' and on the fatter side is the living room. So we kind of have a living room/diner and a kitchen/diner. We always refer to them as rooms (ie - "have you seen my phone charger?" "it's in the living room!"' "be careful when you go downstairs, the cat has left a dead mouse on the dining room floor" etc etc)

We love it. We do have an internal garage which is full of STUFF. We always said we'd convert that to a second living room/snug if we needed to, or wanted extra space. But we haven't had the need.

The main issue with open plan is the absence of walls (and I don't mean in a way that divides rooms, I mean as a useful thing to have) - you have to think very carefully about furniture placement, and it limits things like how many pictures you can put up, or shelves you can have, or where you put your TV (or fireplace, or whatever).

We do have a utility room which means the noise of the washing machine isn't an issue, and there's somewhere for extraneous kitchen bits to go. Our dishwasher is very quiet, but we put it on overnight anyway (not because of noise, but because we have cheaper electricity overnight).

Surely the teens disappear to their own room with friend in tow? This was always then norm when I was a teen.

Not in my house and not when I was growing up. We have 2 sitting rooms and so the teenagers can entertain their friends in one and we can use the other (my parents had 3 sitting rooms so that was even more the case). There's no need for them to go into the private parts of the house when there are enough public rooms.

We had fully open plan but ours was a tiny two bed terrace from the early 1900s so rather than poky rooms we opened it up and it worked really well. It was constantly noisy as you could have the extractor fan/tv/washing machine all going at once but I absolutely loved that house but we had no proper outside space and two DC so we moved. It was great to clean as you were cleaning one floor space rather then different rooms .

I love our open plan kitchen-dining-living area as we all enjoy watching sport together (football, cricket, tennis, major tournaments) and it means that no-one is in the kitchen making lunch/dinner and missing sharing the event together.
However, we do have a hallway - so the room is not open to the whole house; we have a separate living room should anyone want to escape; and a separate utility.