Splitting one bedroom into two? Floorplan help.

[Hopefulmama21]

We're expecting another baby and hoping to make our 4 bed into a 5 bed. I was wondering if anyone can help with a floor plan and what the estimated room sizes will be once complete. I've attached our floor plan, although it's not exactly to scale which is frustrating.

We have 4 good sized doubles currently, and hoping to split bedroom 4 which is the biggest in the house into a double and a single.

The room is roughly 5.1m in length, and 3.5m wide (starting from the end of the little corridor).

My thought is that we extend the corridor by enough to add in one door to each room and then separate with a stud wall.

Ideally this would leave us with two rooms which would be roughly;

Double room - 3.5m x 3.2m
Single room - 3.5m x 1.9m

Is this doable?

It's a big footprint - Is there no downstairs space that could be re-purposed?

I like this better if you can't break into bed3.

But which is going to be the room for guests? This should be big enough to fit a double/king bed and maybe q small chest of drawers, no more, they don't live there so don't need storage and space as much.

No one seems to have considered bedroom 1 for splitting. Easiest to do and both rooms ok size with window,

typo, meant bedroom 2.

If bedroom 2 is split then wouldn't you end up with two really narrow rooms?

@TheOnlyWayIsIlford the space underneath bed 4 is the garage which has been partly converted into a gym/utility and the remaining space left as garage storage.

@Kidsandhouse the guest room is currently Bedroom 3, it will either stay as this room or move into the potential new double made from splitting Bedroom 4.

I will let Teen DC decide which bedroom they want, and if they choose Bedroom 3 we can steal space from the new double and make the single bigger too 🤞🏻

I've added furniture in to scale of what we have, so this weekend I will plot them out in these positions as suggested to see how it feels in real life.

Get rid of the idea of a guest room - it’s the kids full time home first. I thought you had 4 kids but if it’s 3 and a guest room then it’s pretty easy really… no guest room.

Do you not have an area downstairs for a sofa bed, dining room perhaps then the kids can have a proper size bedroom.

How often do you need a guest room?

Can some of the Dc not share temporarily when you have guests?

@TheOnlyWayIsIlford roughly once a month for guests, once a week for me with DH snoring or shift work 😴

I like this much better, but to be honest, think now about the child who will have this new small room, as a previous poster says, this is their home and they deserve the best use of the space.

I might go as far as telling the teen they must move to bed3, and then making bed4 (guest) as small as is practical, and the new bed5 as big as possible

(As a mum with a child currently complaining about being in a box room and the others having bigger rooms, id be fairly sure this will be a problem you'll have in the future)

As an aside, have you thought about heating the two rooms of you split bed 4 does it currently have 2 radiators? If not where will you need to put one?

Personally I might be tempted to work on converting the down stairs space you say garage is partially converted I might be tempted to work on that create a gym/ guest space?

Take a corner off the adjoining bedroom and move that door. Get rid of the hallway door. 2 new doors into each side of the old bedroom

Have you costed this ?
Is bedroom 4 in an extension?
Have you considered that you will need to have re-wiring works done to give each room it's own lights that work independently?

@Kidsandhouse this is something I have thought of being a problem in the future, it's one reason I'd like teen DC to choose the existing double but at almost 18 I also don't want to force them to do something they don't want to do when we're already giving them a smaller room. DC is fully on board with the room being smaller but I would like to give them the choice of where they'd like to be. I will definitely use some persuasive language though 😆

@OrganisedOnTheSurface thankfully there's already two radiators in the room, one under each window. Sorry I wasn't clear when I said partially I meant we have partitioned the garage and one side is still garage but the other has been converted into a proper room, boarded plastered etc and is now the gym/utility.

@MrsMoastyToasty it's not an extension no, it was part of the original house build. Thankfully there are enough sockets in the room for each to have two double sockets if split up, we will need an extra pendant light and switch added though.

Ditch the airing cupboard and make 2 singles out of bedroom 2. The dropped eaves would make that room feel cramped even if you made singles. Wouldnt work as a very small double

@Moellen54 we can't get rid of the airing cupboard, it has the hot water cylinder in it.

A few people have suggested making two singles out of bedroom two but they'd be ridiculously small - 1.7m x 3.2m so effectively two box rooms which wouldn't work for our family.

If we also knocked through bedroom 3 we'd still end up with 1 tiny room due to the window placement, and then two single bedrooms and I believe this would devalue our house and probably be more expensive to do due to knocking down two walls and building two new ones.

Do you think 3.5m x 3.4m is a very small double?

I have a 3.5mx3.5m double. Works fine.

This house has two doubles that are smaller than 3.5x3.4

www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/92221404

How much money do you have? Here is a more drastic option which could work well... all bedrooms would be more evenly sized, you get a bigger family bathroom..

But that makes bedroom 1 about 2.7m wide. And there's an obstacle on the outside wall (? chimney) making the room even narrower in practice, plus the window becomes decentralised. And it creates an almost 5m long corridor down the side of it.

Sounds pretty workable to me. On those measurements you’d end up with about 11.2m for the double and 6.7m for the single, so the double is a decent size and the single is obviously quite narrow.
I’d just check where the windows, radiator and door swings fall before committing to the stud wall. You could also visualise a few layouts in programs like Interiorbox, which might make it easier to see how usable the rooms will actually be.

The extended corridor idea seems sensible though, especially if it lets both rooms have proper doors without eating too much into the bedrooms.

Could two of the children share bedroom 4 with a divider e.g. IKEA kallax so they have their own areas but you don't need to actually recreate new rooms?
(Like in this picture but there's probably more creative ways you could make it look a bit nicer)

If your dc are almost 18 do you really need a permanent solution of this sort?

@mumumental why wouldn't we need a permanent solution just because DC is almoat 18? With the rental market and mortgage rates the way they are I don't envisage them leaving home any time soon 🤣

Re the window being decentralised: I don't have a centered window in my entire house.