Kitchen/diner/living layout

[lstedham]

Hi, we are interested in a property, but I really want a kitchen/diner/living area looking out onto the garden with a separate main living room.
We currently have the open plan kitchen/living but don't have the extra room, and have a conservatory blocking the dining/garden flow.

Anyway, this is the layout of the house we're looking at, and the only way I can see it working is knocking the kitchen/diner through into the bathroom and moving the bathroom into the utility room - but would need a door then into it from the kitchen.
Does anyone have any ideas on layout ect and help with where things could be situated? OH is worried about costs 😬

I can’t see the details on your plan, have you just taken a Screen shot of the listing? Peering at the blur, it looks Like a big job and will be expensive ( if you can get anyone to do it).

Really, you would be better trying to buy a house you like,

Thanks for the reply @Allthegoodnamesarechosen . What other details would you want to see on the floor plan?
Our search radius is very small (live rurally) and therefore there isn't much choice of houses unfortunately... To wait for one that was already done perfectly, we could be waiting our whole lives!

It's too blurry. Without any room names and dimensions there is not much I can suggest

Sorry, this one is maybe a clearer version

Thanks. With so much downstairs space the world's your oyster in a sense, but building work is so expensive. It depends what levers you have. Do you need and want all 5 bedrooms?

Knocking the utility, WC and back strip of garage into the kitchen may be an option. Consider boiler room in the mix - if boiler needs replacing anyway, moving it might not add vastly to the cost. Optionally fill in the utility/kitchen missing corner. The extra width you'd get in the kitchen entrance from including the boiler room would be really welcome as 8'11 is quite narrow for a main thoroughfare. You might need to put the kitchen units there perhaps in double galley arrangement, so people walk through into an open dining living area, otherwise it would risk be dead space. Having the working kitchen there would also stop it being too disconnected from the rest of the house.

You could then relocate the utility into a laundry room elsewhere, perhaps a strip along the back wall of the living room (changing it to approx 14' square, which is still big for what would become a second living room, and putting a new living room door in closer to the front door), or into a bedroom if you have more of those than you need. A laundry room can be upstairs too.

It may be way out of budget though. I'm just not convinced that knocking a 6 foot square bathroom into a long thinnish kitchen is going to give you the space for both a dining room and a living area along with the kitchen. But there is SO much space to play with, you should be able to find something that feels generous.

This is the sort of thing I would do. Only disadvantage is that the bathroom doesn’t have an external window but you could put the utility in the end of the garage or swap the bathroom and utility over if that’s an issue. You’d need a decent budget for this though.

Image here (might take a min to load)

Thanks @Heronwatcher & @Splain for the suggestions so far, sound quite extensive 😓

Do you think if I knocked through from the kitchen/diner into the bathroom and bedroom 1, relocated bathroom to utility toilet area, and relocated the bedroom to around 2m of the living room space would be cheaper? Would this compromise the living room size too much? It would still leave a 4.33mx4m space?

I think your plan definitely would be cheaper but wouldn’t all the bedrooms have to access the bathroom right through the kitchen? And I would be slightly concerned about the size of the lounge. Overall I think you might want try to keep the bedrooms and bathroom to one end of the house and the kitchen/ lounge/ utility at the other end.

That’s such an annoying layout. How are you getting to the utility?!

This is the best I can do. But the porch door being there is so annoying I would remove that as it will restrict your use of the room.

Red - bed/ study
Lounge smaller at front
Green - glazed bifold or sliders.

@Heronwatcher yes, it would mean bathroom is accessed via kitchen, but there is also a bathroom upstairs.
@Anon2536474 thanks, that's similar to what I was thinking! Annoyingly, utility is only accessed via outside atm, so would have to put a door in from kitchen. Could I ask what the yellow and blue are on the plan please? Corner and bathroom?!

Oh sorry, blue is bathroom and yellow is a kind of seat corner cloakroom thing. Like an open boot room vibe.

I would add a door in for utility then and take the door out of the porch.

Would also be tempted to split the utility to half a walk in larder. Could even be the kind of sliding door hidden walk through rooms.

I think that looks good but it would also be quite extensive and expensive.

You could perhaps put an extra door between the big room and the doors to new bathroom and bedrooms. That would be a door to the "upstairs" (more private) rooms and would help with sound insulation when someone's sleeping. The new red bedroom wouldn't be very good to sleep in being between living room and kitchen, but it would work great as an office or playroom. If it needs to be a child's bedroom I'd be inclined to somehow keep the blue room as a bedroom.

Adapting the WC into a bathroom makes a lot of sense and it wouldn't be too weird to have it coming off a massive kitchen living dining room as long as the door is not near the kitchen bit. However I think you'd want a loo and preferably a shower closer to the bedrooms too, eg tha blue bit on the diag. Otherwise it would feel a bit like having a downstairs bathroom in a house with upstairs bedrooms - a bit of a trek in the middle of the night or in an emergency.

It's easy to get carried away these days when even £100k doesn't necessarily go that far. It's outside my expertise but if you could add an approx budget people might be better able to advise.

Do you need 4 bedrooms? If not, could you merge bedroom 1 and 2 to make a kitchen/diner with doors out on to the garden and make the kitchen a bedroom? You would need to enclose it, so not having to access it to get to the porch and boiler room.

Thanks everyone.
@Splain I really wouldnt be looking to be spending more than £30k tbh, as house itself is quite expensiveSl so looking for the least disruptive method possible 🙈 (we're not bad with DIY so can do some stuff ourselves + I'm quite good at bargain hunting to keep new bathroom/kitchen costs down)
@Residentnumber1 the 4th bedroom would be a spare room. Would be really nice to have one. The present kitchen/diner would be a massive bedroom if we went with that route!

Also, I think the porch door would be used more than the front door as that is the one by the parking area.

Oh it’s a spare! That changes things. You could just have the front lounge as a spare room by using a sofa bed. That’s what we are doing as I don’t want to sacrifice living space for the sake of a few nights a year.

Alternatively sacrifice the utility to have that as a new separate bed/ en-suite. Would be nice for guests to be out of the way. And also near the kitchen for anything they need.

You would be sacrificing utility here. But really it’s just a glorified holding pen for laundry and clutter. You could have a stack here in the old WC. Or design something for under the stairs.

For other utility related things putting a dirty sink in the garage would suffice for cleaning rollers and dirty stuff.

I am still convinced that porch door has to go.

Added a layout - pink is a rectory table with inbuilt bench on one side.

£30k really isn’t much of a budget in the current climate, so major building work and extensions are out. You’ll have to look at how you can reorganise the existing space with minimal building work.

If you enclosed the existing kitchen/diner it would be what, roughly 16ft long by just under 9ft wide, so a decent size, but not huge, big enough for a double bed, some wardrobes and some other bits of furniture. Plus it would be a nice bedroom with access to the garden. That would leave the porch as your main access point. In future you could convert part of the garage, when funds allow, to create a spare room.

So for 30k ish what I would do is

• add patio doors to end of kitchen and create space in front of them for a small ish dining table with comfy chairs by moving units towards the lounge.
• have some beautiful pale units to frame the door, a bit like the pic below although yours would have a table at the end.
• improve access to utility room, either by an internal doorway from the end of the kitchen or by having a pergola/ enclosed porch at the end of the kitchen.
• Have as much functional kitchen stuff you can in the utility so you can make the kitchen as beautiful as possible.
• Have double doors through to the existing lounge so in the summer it can be one big room but also be closed off if you prefer to be cosy.

This is very nice actually. Very efficient use of money and a really nice design.

Love that @Heronwatcher. Really good use of the space.

OP taking all of @Heronwatcher's plan, with a bit more budget you could perhaps consider also relocating washing machine and turning the utility room into a snug, if you want a second living space. The washing machine could go at the back of the garage, or in a "utility/laundry cupboard" in the spare bedroom or new snug - basically a cupboard that hides a washing machine and dryer but with the door closed just looks like a wardrobe. Fitting a washing machine and dryer to the bedroom wall that backs onto the bathroom should not be too expensive, and the washing would be well out of the way of daily life in the spare room. I've even seen people put in drying cupboards lately - like an airing cupboard but instead of a hot water tank they just have a dehumidifier. Not sure how effective they are.