Tiny bedrooms and awkward layout and galleried landing

[Housepalaver]

We’re thinking about a house move and there’s a very cool house, but the upstairs is such a mess!
I’m not sure exactly what walls could come down in terms of structural or not, but they’re all so narrow- but crucially we don’t need 5 beds, - 4 beds would be much better if they were usable!
Not fussed about the double height galleried landing, but don’t know how easy it is to put a floor back in there?
Help! How would you rearrange things?

Image attaching.
Also, this house is at the top of our budget, so we don’t necessarily have money for anything too extravagant or complicated

The main issue is bedrooms 2 and 3 but you can’t solve that and still get to bedroom 1. Taking the storage out of bedroom 4 would make bedroom 5 better but they are all very narrow.

Really you need to to move the corridor to bedroom 1 to one side of the house but it wouldn’t be cheap.

This is what I’m thinking. I’m worried that while there should be enough space, especially if we can lose a room, it’s just going to be so complicated and therefore pricey!

Can you post the ground floor plan also? The stairs on this level

The downstairs is also a bit random ! We can potentially move the stairs into the galleried bit or somewhere more useful.

For me the cheapest solution is to make bedroom 4 & 5 the new master and not have an ensuite. Share the bathroom with bedroom 3. Move the entrance to bedroom 4 and then you can square off the bathroom and put a bath back in there long term if you want one in the house.
Then bedroom 2 & 4 share a converted Jack and Jill bathroom. Get rid of the bath.
Bedrooms 3 & 2 remain smallish, but you could put storage into bedroom 3 taking some space away from the bathroom next door with a simple partition wall, and have a door through it to the bathroom.

One of the easiest options would be to remove the door to the right of the stairs. Put a new door into Bed 3 on the corner. Make an end to the corridor just beyond that and incorporate the corridor into Bed 2 and make Bed 3 a dressing room for the master (putting a new door in where the cupboard currently is). This would make Bed 2 substantially larger. It doesn't help with 4 and 5 but they don't seem as small as 3?

What’s the massive cupboard in bed 5? Can that go? If it’s for a hot water cylinder then for the cost of a combi boiler you can have a much bigger room!
Depending on how many bedrooms would be fully occupied I’d be tempted to have bed 2 as a dressing room, bed 3 as an office/spare single and take the cupboard out of 5 to even those rooms out a bit.
Is there a suitable room downstairs that could be a guest double (if you want one?)
We’ve got a long, thin house and it is a PITA for storage and getting furniture to fit (or up the stairs!) but we love it

Also, if you removed the gallery there’s no windows on the landing so no natural light

I would knock through bed 4 and 5 and cupboard to make that bed 1. Remove the dog leg and make the current main bathroom the ensuite for bed 1.

You could then take a small corner off of the existing bed 1 to make the current ensuite the main bathroom.

I would:

• get rid of the storage cupboard that's eating up so much of bed 5
• Get rid of bed 3 altogether
• Move the corridor to bed 1 down to the side of the house where bed 3 was (it would need to bend around the gallery)
• Extend bed 2 into the old corridor space (you'd probably need to chop a corner off to make space)

How expensive this all is will depend on whether any of the walls are load-bearing. If they aren't, it probably won't be too bad - you don't have to replace/move any bathrooms or plumbing, the stairs can stay where they are, and you keep the galleried space. Any solution that rationalises the bedroom will involve moving walls, that's unavoidable.

If cost is an issue, is it liveable for the short term, @Housepalaver? Whatever you decide to do, I am definitely a big believer in doing the right thing for the long term, even if you can't do it straight away

ooh thank you for all of these suggestions. It turns out that a lot of the walls
are only studs, so hopefully quite easy to knock about. Both bathrooms need redoing, so it’s really not a problem to pull them around.
Im trying to work out whether it’s worth it all, or we should just go for a done house in a slightly less good location

I like the master being in 4/5 and the bathroom becoming en-suite, and then rejigging the other end. All of those walls except the front to back one in the centre of the house can come out and be moved if necessary