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?

Using shelving units as room dividers is a toppling hazard. Don't do it, unless you have a means to fasten them to the ceiling.

I quite like this. You could also consider pushing the dividing wall a bit further into the top room to end up with something like the below if you wanted two more equally sized rooms (the top one would still be a double). The advantage of this would also be that the bottom room could have a pocket door, or a sliding door (where I’ve put the black line), which would take up less space in the room.

After reading loads of comments you get to the one is being used as a guest room. You surely look after family first and any guests either fit in when there or stay outwith

I wouldn't he giving up a room for once a month and as for the snoring earplugs to buy

If you’re not expecting your oldest to move out for many years it seems unfair that your youngest is going to be stuck in a poky room just so you can have a guest room tbh

when I was a kid my sister and I used to bunk in together and the guests would use her room (she had a double)

and if your oldest is off to uni then you’ll have at least 9 months a year to use his room

Sure but you don’t know that yet. Shelling out for a permanent solution now seems extreme, particularly when the property market is starting to wane and construction costs are way above normal. With the demographic of your family changing, how suitable will this solution be when the baby is no longer a baby? I would be looking at a temporary solution to see if it works before taking the most awkward of your 4 bedrooms and turning it into something more unusable.

Have you no outside space? You could get a decent garden building for guests for the price of these works.

@BeardySchnauzer my eldest isn't going to uni, they have an apprenticeship.

Do you really think a 2.4 x 3.5 room is considered poky? We will try the configuration this weekend as mentioned earlier on the thread. If, in years to come, the youngest wants a bigger room we can swap them into one of the bigger rooms and make the smallest the guest room.

@BoredZelda how much does a habitable garden room cost to buy as install?

We've costed buying the materials, installing the partition wall, and the new light fitting at just between £2-2.5k.

What’s your downstairs layout?

@Hopefulmama21 I think your idea is a really clever use of space. I would guess (obviously nobody knows for certain) that having a 5th bedroom may even increase your house value, but if not, then it's a fairly straightforward fix to put it back again.

Put a cot into the guest room, and for once a month when you have guests baby goes into travel cot with you. Extra bonus if they’re not sleeping well you get a proper bed in their room too.

Then when baby is older they decamp to your middle child’s room when you have guests - get a trundle bed for them.

So if you’re going to create one small single room would it be the guest room? Do you ever have multiple guests staying?

wouldn’t it be simpler to keep the bedrooms as they are and have the baby give up their room while guests stay and bunk in with you or the 5yo?

or is there an option downstairs to create a separate small bedroom (maybe the garage storage? If you build a shed for the stuff). Or invest in a lovely sofa bed for one of rooms that can be used for guests. An office or playroom perhaps