Lovely Nic - Thank you :) No - If you have a downstairs WC then you don't need a family bathroom in my opinion either. It's all about you and how *you* use your home. I think it essential to have a facility for the guests downstairs (toilet and basin) but the rest is personal areas to you so should reflect you and your needs - like the kids with the showers! Great that that's taken care of. I love the feature window for the fields. I hope the other one gets passed (on the right) but if not a mirror on that side would help reflect the window the other side and give you the same impression but allow any storage you may require.

We’re in the process of taking down our conservatory and having a rear extension for exactly the same reasons - a bigger kitchen and it’s terrible in the depths of winter and height of summer. You can try to sell your conservatory if it’s in reasonable condition. We got £350 for ours which is much better than the £600 in labour and skip hire it would have cost to have it removed. Even giving it away for free can still be worth it if it saves labour costs. I would assume that nothing about the conservatory can be reused. Generally the foundations and flooring are just not good enough. But if it turns out yours are then you’ll be pleasantly surprised rather than having a hole in your budget. Cost wise it depends on how big the area is, where you live and what you’re having done. We’re around £50k for a build of 23 sqm, but it also involves some drainage work and a very large steel beam. All decorative works (including the kitchen) are excluded from that as you can spend anywhere from £5k to £50k+ on a kitchen depending what you’re looking for. We got an architect and a structural engineer as ours is a bit complicated with the span of the steel beam, but if it’s quite simple you may be ok just with a builder. You can usually find a few architects who will come out to quote (or do a video call in the current climate) and they will be a good source of advice. We struggled to get builders interested without architects drawings as the drawings show you are serious, but they could just be because everyone is extending their properties where we live so builders are in high demand. When you need layout advice there are lots of people on Houzz who can offer very valuable input so never be afraid to ask.

Ideally a house should be "balanced", i.e. the right amount of reception space in relation to the number of bedrooms, so your comments make sense. I would suggest a first floor extension is a good place to start, if it's possible to connect to the rest of the floor plan without losing existing usable floor space. The other issue to consider is the roof over the new extension, and how that would integrate with the existing one. As for foundations, you could dig a few trial holes and get a structural engineer to assess their capacity to support further loading. Usually they are fine, but you need to check. A loft conversion starts at around £20k, but bear in mind it will have impact on the rest of the house, i.e. fire doors and losing space for new stairs, and the room won't have full headroom. A dormer may help though. Let me know if you need any further help !

Dear Volhal, You certainly need optimism, but tempered with experience. The job being finished off at the moment is in a terraced street ,sloping in all directions front to back and side to side. The kitchen / dining extension is at the back so all the excavated material has had to come through the house ,and the front is several steps up, so we parked the skip and ran a conveyor through the house to the skip. At the worst moment the family rented a place for a week and then back. For most people the ideal would be to go and leave the site till the end but not many can afford months of renting on top of the building costs . The family range from 4, 7 to 9 and when Mum said yipee we will be free of the builders there was a chorus of 'why mum we like the builders' ( with lockdown probably the only people the children have seen recently !) Your architect can check out the ground floor construction and that will help decide how and where to run drains and pipes and cables and how best to provide what you want. Yes you can have all manner of problems , as outlined above, Understand them, be aware of them, they can be solved, at a cost Chose your team wisely and not just on price.