Stuck for inspiration! Need help with this floor plan
Hi all, my mother’s partner is buying this
house but we’re totally lacking floor plan inspiration. The house needs almost
complete modernisation, but we need a “plan” so that we know where to start!
The two main areas we’re struggling with
are the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen. We’d like a large kitchen/diner
extension with a utility room (there will be a separate toilet too, probably
under the stairs). The "garden room" is a lean to and pretty much needs to come down anyway.
In terms of the bathroom, I like the idea of knocking the bathroom and toilet
into one and having a large walk in shower in the area that the toilet was in,
however I don’t know if this is a ridiculous idea and if it leaves enough space
for the toilet, sink and bath.
Open to any ideas whatsoever, I’d love to
hear what you’d do with the house! It has a HUGE garden so extending outwards (ground
floor) is definitely possible. Thanks :)
Comments (15)
Related Discussions
Calling all inspired architects and designers. Help needed!!!
Comments (15)Good morning!, Well i've been at this one now for nearly 2 1/2 hours! One of the main problems is the entrance. I didn't want to incorporate the garage, as with a full house, outside storage is all important, I know just how much stuff we have in ours. I also kept in mind the your requirement for front to back access. Thus, i moved the entrance to the other side of the house ( garage side ), Hopefully when postie arrives he will naturally presume the entrance is on that side, ( i think you would! ) I split the kitchen / downstairs cloakroom to give you a much bigger cloakroom / downstairs shower room - don't know if you have dogs, but very handy for washing them and mucky kids without trapsing upstairs! This split area also gives you your Utility Room. ( However, you could have a smaller cloakroom and a bigger Utility dependant on your own requirements. ) Also, I extended slightly across the front to the left to make downstairs slightly bigger ( filling in the gap on the original plan ) - and give way to two reception rooms, so the front will be continuous with no set back. ( That part could be dependant on budget, as you could make do with a slightly smaller 2nd reception. ) So, some more planting in the front garden will ensure that you know there is no entrance on the left. Bearing in mind that a house full of kids / teenagers can be very noisy and that zoning would also be my preference, I put the two main reception rooms at the front, seperated them by a nice hallway and gave you a study / music / teenage den in the middle of the house, off the kitchen diner. The extension ( preferably full height to allow amendments to the upstairs ) gives the noisey heart of the home to the rear. If you do the full height extension it gives way further to a much larger Master bedroom suite, a family bathroom, and a seperate toilet / shower room ( All of that will be dependant on your budget. ) The build itself in my lowly opinion is infinitely do'able on your budget, where a lot of people go wrong, is that they just don't realise how much of the budget goes on refurbishing the internals, ( New Kitchen, bathroom fitting, flooring etc ) So keep a good chunk for that! Always get at least 3 quotations for the build, and try and get a fixed price one if you can. I hope that covers it, and that you can imagine what it looks like walking around the new layout. It's easy for the experts, but no so easy for the homeowner, as quite often you can get stuck on what things look like at the moment. Try and blank that out, and imagine a completely different house. Good luck x...See MoreNeed help with floor plan !
Comments (7)Hi Shyam, If you are looking to hire a Concept Planner - be mindful of spending money before you have completed on the property ! We have worked on a couple of projects that have ended with the client not ending up buying the property we worked on with them. Fine if you are doing this as a feasibility study and you decide to pull out of the purchase if you can’t do what you want with it - but if your budget is tight ... might be an idea to wait until you have exchanged contracts at the earliest!...See MoreOpen plan or semi open plan? Floor plan / furniture layout help please
Comments (5)Hi all, Thank you for your comments; I appreciate them! Natasha - the units you have suggested are very much what I had in mind. We will have a shaker kitchen and the media unit would also be shaker style and would have 4-6 cupboards with the TV in the middle with book shelves either side. Part of the reason we kept a partial wall was to make the space more usable. I can’t envision how the fully open plan room will be able to meet all our needs, but I am open to ideas! I feel that open plan would be more impressive, but potentially less usable. With regards to the doors. I do plan to reverse the doors both into the kitchen and family room part, but couldn’t work out how to do it on the app I used for the floor plan. It is a 1920s house and we have the original doors which we are planning to keep. We are also keeping a lot of floor space as when the table is not extended, we still have young children with lots of Lego and trains etc. I plan for these to be hidden in the cupboards at bedtime. J - we haven’t installed the kitchen but we have ordered it and paid a big deposit. Some of the units are bespoke/irregular sizes and I don’t think we would be willing to change this. I have attached a photo of our rendered kitchen plan. Thanks again for your comments. It is good to have other people’s opinions and ideas....See MoreI need help with a floor plan
Comments (8)Not necessarily! I'm sure there's lots you can do with it and you have the benefit of a good sized space/plot and it looks flat and accessible, which is a huge bonus for building work. I wonder whether you really do need to extend into the garage though as it sounds as though there's quite a lot of space at the back that you could work with, and perhaps you could retain the garage and the good storage that comes with that (I know people who have converted garages into living space and later regretted it because of the loss of storage for bikes, garden equipment yadda yadda). To be 100% honest I think your first step is to refine what it is you really want and need in terms of extra space/functionality, define how much money you have to put behind it - and then talk that through with an architect. It sounds like you will need an architect involved at some point anyway, if you're looking at extending at the back, and I think that relationship functions better if you go to them with a clear brief of what you need, rather than a fully formed idea of how to do it. Does that make sense? An architect's role, in part, is to understand your needs and then come up with a solution which meets your brief, in a way which will improve the internal flow and the external look of the house. As a client, part of your role is to be open to the professional's ideas and to assess whether they meet your brief, rather than defining the solutions yourself. So I think worrying about where the front door is, isn't really the issue - and your time/effort is better spent in defining what doesn't work for you in the house at the moment, and what your family's needs are, now and in the future. For example, you mention putting in a shower downstairs, but that's jumping straight to a solution which may not be the best one - an architect will respond to a brief which includes "we need another shower", with a solution which considers the layout of the whole house (it might be that you can get one in upstairs instead). So overall you'll get a better, more considered result than if you say "I want a shower here and I want the front door in the middle", type conversation. I hope that makes sense and doesn't put you off!...See MoreSophie Bridge
8 years ago
titiankim
8 years agoSophie Bridge
8 years agoSophie Bridge
8 years agoI've just sketched this idea (obviously not to scale!). The utility may be a little larger than average but I don't think that's a bad thing in this case (allows for another fridge, the washing machine etc and storage).
What does everyone think?
minnie101
8 years agoSophie Bridge
8 years agotitiankim
8 years ago
PROOnePlan
8 years agoSophie Bridge
8 years agoThanks all! Unfortunately it's not really possible to notmodernise fairly soonish. I don't think the house has been touched since it was built (20s/30s), which means electrics are really old and the house needs to be re-wired, which in itself is a large job so we may as well do some internal work at the same time.
I'm warming to the idea of a shower room downstairs, but I can't see where it would fit. We'd be keeping the doorway out to the side, but I think it'd be weird to walk into a shower room from there. Preferably you'd walk into the utility and the shower room would be off that, but I just can't figure it out floor plan-wise. Any ideas?
titiankim - well spotted RE the windows in the rear reception. There's actually a window on the right leading towards the current "garden room" and there are two internal windows too. Funnily enough the rear reception room is really light currently. If we went with the sketch I drew, we'd keep it so that there are windows going all the way around that side and into the kitchen/diner. I also like the idea of keeping the two internal windows, plus the double doors to the kitchen would have windows too, so it'd still be quite bright. I think it's a wise idea to keep both reception rooms as I do think my mother's partner and his father would like their own space (plus the rear reception would make a great play room for future families). I've attached a photo of this room so you get a better idea.
minnie101
8 years agominnie101
8 years agoSophie Bridge
8 years ago
gardenm1