Hi Catherine. Try speaking with Mike Neal - he solves all sorts of home office conversion issues. He does everything from conversions to building home office cabins from scratch, with a pile of timber and your ideas. His team turn up with a load of Oak and a few tools but at the end of the job you have a handcrafted staircase for example - pure genius! I am sure Mike could create a way of making the two sides match, even if it uses dot matrix printing to make them look identical from a distance. Let me know if you want his contact details. BR, Neil

I think that by the end of this week we'll finally be completed !!!! We had the carpenters around yesterday to fit the skirting boards and put in a nice hardwood threshold and to fit door architraves etc. Sometime this week we should have the painters back to put a 3rd coat on the walls & ceiling, paint the skirtings & doors (F&B Worsted like the rest of the house) Then before the end of the week the builders are back just to finish the little things (the wire for the radiator needs to look better, either trunking or clipped neatly to the wall and painted) etc. We did the standard ceremonial trip to IKEA over the weekend and got the cabinets, blinds, shelves, picture frames etc (plus the obvious 150 tea-light candles that will never get used) It's within touching distance. I phoned the landscape people yesterday and given them 2 weeks notice to start their work as they need to hire a massive sump grinder as the one they have isn't big enough, and give them time to prep. now that the skip and builder have tidied everything up.

Fair points canonja & rinked.I really liked your layout rinked and it has made me think. We did start with this idea initially however, wanted a bigger kitchen. Hence move bathroom to the corner where it will also be an ensuite. The wall in the study is only in the design if we construct in phases leaving the garage bedroom out. That makes bedroom 1 much larger. I also recognise that there's lots of space in current kitchen so perhaps that could be used for the utility space! Can there be s way to have the bathroom/ toilet elsewhere in the garage space? We are also installing s new megaflow system.

I would consider what would be nicer to use rather than what will add value to the house. consider all the little things like, which one would give you nicer light to be sat in all day? which one would give a better work/home boundary (for example if from your kitchen you’d see into the office would you be thinking of work while eating dinner, that kind of thing!) Also which space would be missed more, the garage or the bit of garden taken up by garden room. we’ve just ordered a garden room for a home gym, we originally planned to use our garage but realised after a few months of living here that the garage was much more useful for storage and a workshop, and that a garden room would be much nicer to work out in!