We bought a house during Covid, with plans to turn the attic room into a dormer and our bedroom, so we'd have enough rooms.
It also needs the kitchen doing; which has been in place since 1985, and is very much showing it's age now. Two doors have fallen off. The worktops look old and worn, and the oven only works half the time.
We've gone through the whole process to design and get measured up for a kitchen, including having the floor dug up and replaced with chipboard temporarily, and it was all due to be installed in early June... but the kitchen branch has just called to say that due to a head office issue, they can no longer offer finance.
We can probably put it on a credit card, but that feels risky.
We could move forward with plans to do the dormer, but we've had three architects around in the last week, and one is adamant that we won't get the dormer through planning as there won't be enough floor space, and we'll waste £2k on drawings to prove that. The others have generally said it "should be possible", but they wait for drawings to confirm.
We'd remortgage for the dormer, so could conceivably add the kitchen costs to that.
Or, we can just get some maintenance done - the roof has spray foam which needs removing, and we're missing some tiles from recent storms - and wait until we've saved enough for the kitchen. At the moment, we're planning to work in Europe for a few years from September, so this is possible, but it would mean we couldn't let out the house. We hadn't definitely intended to, but it was an option, and it wouldn't be with this kitchen...
My husband has started various DIY projects, like removing all carpets and things, which along with the very rubbish kitchen means we couldn't sell right now, but I don't think we'd want to anyway. Europe will be a temporary thing for work. We do love our location, even if the state of the house is making me miserable at the moment.
What would you do first?