We refurbished our new house that hadn’t been touched since the 80s. It’s a big old Edwardian semidetached.
put in as much insulation as you can and provably air source heat pump….
first thing we had to do was sort out the plumbing, they’d used small bore pipes to put in the central heating. nothing worked. They were clogged up beyond the point of being able to flush out the sludge. All pipes and radiators changed,
best thing was open up the staircase into the attic, it makes the attic rooms accessible and brought light right down through the house. turned the windows less dark upstairs landing into a lovely space.
we turned the very very small original kitchen into a utility and replaced the conservatory with an extension with a decent kitchen, underfloor heating and space to have a sofa facing the garden.
put in a downstairs loo. Very handy. wish we’d reconfigured to put in a shower too, which actually would have been really useful, messy dog and MAMIL husband….but not enough headroom….but we could have changed this round.
we planned a couple of big cupboards, but one has boiler and th3 other ended up with the uf heating manifold so neither suitable as pantries. We could have had a pantry which would have been great.
Boiling water tap is nice.