Would a five-bedroom house with a small kitchen put buyers off

[Lastgig]

Would you buy a 5 bed house with a 10ft kitchen?
We're trying to sell our house and to date have had no luck. It's a modern house.

We've been quoted silly money to take down a supporting wall between the kitchen and the breakfast room. A new small kitchen would cost us ( due to family contacts) £5k. The wall plus new flooring and moving gas/electrics £25k.
I do need a more accessible kitchen due to my disability but I also need to downsize.

Yes - particularly these days.

What would I do?
If I loved the house and wanted to future proof and didn't give a shit about imaginary future people.
Take out the door to the utility or make it a pocket door so the kitchen sort of flows into the next space. Refit the whole area to suit you -
Nearest the breakfast room to become dining space

Sink, bin, dishwasher and shelves for everyday crockery, don't forget you can raise a dishwasher to make loading easier.
Hot drink stuff together, on upper shelf mugs and ingredients near kettle or hot tap.
Cooking - oven & hob with drawers nearby for saucepans and utensils, sieves, etc
Prep area- work surface with drawers, all your prep tools that you instinctively expect to find them rolls of foil. Etc, tupperware,
Pantry - tins and dried goods, could be in utility.
Tall open shelves with ready, daily use pet food, daily gadgets like toaster, bread, open sauces and chutneys.
Well thought out shelves/dresser probably in current breakfast room with all your serving dishes.

Ruthlessly declutter, now is the time.

Make dining room into bedroom, knock through under stairs to make cloakroom into ensuite with shower.

Leave upstairs for guests and dustbunnies.

We are also looking for 5 bed- 4 bed + study to be accurate, and I couldn’t bid on a place with a small kitchen and bring up teens in it. I’d be better off staying where we are with 2 dc sharing a bedroom and waiting till we have more money.

It wouldn’t put me off if it was reflected in the price and there was scope to alter and/or extend.

Yes. We bought a 4 bed with tiny kitchen.

But it had been on the market for about 18 months without selling, then been repossessed. We'd dismissed it becof the small kitchen, as a lot of others did.

First thing we did was to extend the dining room into a dining kitchen

From what you've said here, your house is already cheap so DO NOT start spending money on major upgrades or changes. You need to make sure it's being marketed properly, the agent is being pro-active in marketing and that includes making it clear you are competitively priced/priced to sell/quick sale required. This always attracts people who are after a bargain and let them make the necessary changes.

Agreed that kitchens can be too big, but if I wanted to downsize, I wouldn’t be looking for FIVE bedrooms, so that particular set-up would certainly put me off.

I suspect that a 5 bedroom house with a tiny kitchen is also a bit poky overall: maybe one of those 3 or 4 storey townhouses with a small ground floor “footprint” and with all the upstairs space converted to bedrooms? Loads of stairs.

Who really needs that in these days of small families and no servants? Five bedrooms is a family home, so that means a decent sized kitchen-dining area.

I think PPs saying that the price needs to reflect the fact that work is required have it right. I don’t know about doing the work yourself first: depends on how much you need to spend on it and how much that will be recouped in the selling price. Thwt depends on the rest of the house as well, including its location.

When you say plans - do you mean a structural surveyor or architect has calculated the load and steels - needed to remove wall? Or you do you mean a kitchen plan from magnet kitchen? The former would be helpful (along with an estimate), the latter is pointless since it’s just a visualisation, of a kitchen your future buyer may or may not like.

This. I was expecting to see smaller.

That doesn't actually look that small. 1 house my sister lived in was absolutely tiny. Just big enough for a small fridge washing machine and cooker. With a tiny worktop space and a couple of cupboards. It was so narrow all the kitchen appliances could only fit in one wall. There was a couple of feet floor space and the other side just had the back door.

given that there is also a utility, I wouldn't do a thing and do NOTHING expensive. I certainly wouldn't be taking walls down or spending out on a new kitchen. Have you thought of changing the house to suit your needs? I am not sure about grant options now and you may want to move for other reasons but have you spoken to your council about a home assessment?

I don't think this would put me off. Your breakfast room/kitchen/utility is a lovely big space. I would buy it with the plan of opening up the kitchen and breakfast room, possibly using the utility as a utility/pantry. But I am the sort of person who loves a project so I would always choose somewhere I can make my own over somewhere with a new kitchen that wouldn't be something I would choose but couldn't justify replacing

From my experience I wouldn't recommend this approach. My MIL went down this route....15 years on from the stair lift being installed she is still living in a large 4 bed house that she can't cope with. She's eternally stressed with it's maintenance, now has to have 'staff' - cleaner, gardener, carer to enable her to stay there. She regrets not making the move to a small bungalow years ago but feels she couldn't cope with the upheaval now. She is one fall from having to go into a care home.

I posted general thoughts on house plans without having seen your photos and floor plans, so I need to change my mind a little: I think thwt actually looks nice - not at all what I was envisaging. What you could do, as I think someone else said, is take down the middle wall into the breakfast room so that your cooker would be what the guy who designed our kitchen called a “peninsula” (instead of an island). Another kitchen place just refused outright to do it because it wasn’t quite the triangle shape that they obviously learn in kitchen-fitting school.

In fact we went for that and it works really well - it means I’m cooking facing people, instead of having my back to them. I love it.

You would have course need to make sure the space on the other side of your cooker was wide enough to be safe from little hands reaching up, or even just against spills and splashes. But that’s easy to do by having a ledge that can be anything from space just to set something on, or else a proper eating area for breakfast with stools underneath.

I’d probably keep the utilities area (but maybe put in a pocket door, if it’s easy enough to do). I think if you want to integrate that space into the rest of the kitchen, you’re getting into major renovations which, if your health isn’t good you probably want to avoid. And if the buyers want to do that themselves then they still can.

I would reduce the cost to meet the market.

People enjoy remodeling the kitchen to suit themselves so often they don't mind but the cost has to reflect the work needed.

If it's priced competitively like it sounds it is that wouldn't put me off, I'd just be planning to take that wall down myself in the future, I've done something similar in two previous homes.

Well it’s not quite the same thing but we rent a sizeable house with a tiny kitchen and the rent was lower than similar size / a bit bigger properties because of that

We do have a huge dining room and a reasonable utility, so it’s OK

I'd see this as a great opportunity, I'd be knocking down the wall and realistically probably doing a small extension on the back to make a big kitchen/dining/family space. However I'd expect the house to be priced to reflect the fact that we were gonna have to spend a substantial amount of money to get a more modern setup.

But then you wouldn’t be looking for a 5 bedrooms house after the kids have moved out?

This. Having to pay for a “new kitchen” that didn’t reflect my preferences and needs?

much worse than paying a little less, doing the work right away and getting the kitchen I actually want / need.

OP’s kitchen wouldn’t deter me IF the price was right and the location matched my preferences / needs.

Definitely would put me off

Depends on the price and if it ticked most of the other boxes.
The house we’re in now has a small kitchen, it was the compromise we made because it was a good house for our budget and in an ideal area.
There is also an utility room.
There is potential to extend too so people can decide whether they want to do that in the future

I would expect a much lower price with a tiny kitchen.

I would certainly get another quote, 25k seems extortionate for knocking a wall down, I would presume the builder doesn't want the work and has overpriced to reflect that; but I live in the arse end of nowhere and I know prices are affected by area. Might be a good idea to get seperate quotes, builder, sparky, plumber, plasterer etc.