I looking for a pro to remove a chimney breast and create a through lounge. I need more depth in a narrow living room and more light. Can you recommend someone? Thankyou

I don't think it will look strange at all. It's quite common practice these days to open out the two rooms and remove one fireplace. It gives you more room and you only need one working / feature fireplace per space really. Don't forget that although you are taking out the stack in the attic, and possibly the one in the dining room, you still need to put in supports ( ghost hangers ) for the brickwork that is part of the chimney stack in the bedroom above it!

Thanks for your advice both of you. We live in England to answer your question Gabby. Is there a rule in Scotland that the aisles have to be 120cm and if so why ? Jonathan, I was kind of thinking we would want to use the island for eating meals on like we do now with our current kitchen table, but I guess if the DR is open to the kitchen then it wouldn't be a problem to take a few steps more to the dining room table (because we use it so infrequently at the moment I am finding that hard to visualise). I am going to post a better plan of our current kitchen and dining room (with the pantry taken out) and I am also going to post a photo looking out from the window in our dining room. I am wondering if we did turn the DR into our kitchen could we make the window ledge higher and put the units in an L-shape so we could put the sink in the window? (and still have space for an island) I know this goes against some of my earlier points, especially about being worried people would be able to look in at us/and would create a more goldfish bowl feeling but I am just playing around with ideas.

We were planning a kitchen reno 1.5 years ago. We needed to knock down a load-bearing wall between kitchen and dining room, built over a side door, remove all old flooring and install new laminate and kitchen units. The first quote a mate gave us was for £25k. Two others quoted £10k but were impossible to get hold off. Apparently, our project was too small for them. Finally we found a fab local family, who quoted us £7.5k for everything excluding laminated floors&kitchen install. We were to hire a carpenter separately and found a decent one which was charging £1.5k for kitchen installation and £1k (I think) for laminated floors.