Hi. I have to agree and disagree with Jonathan on kitchen layout. Unfortunately, it is a common mistake to leave the layout as the last thing to consider. Your kitchen will be the center of your house, space between the dining area and living room. Your family and friends will spend most of the time rather around the kitchen table, chatting, having a drink, coffee, breakfast (add a lot of more) than around dining table or on the sofa. To properly establish the layout may be the most important choice you will have to make. How you cook, how you will move around the kitchen, how do you prepare meals and hundreds of more questions to be answered. Therefore the position of the fridge, what kind of extractor will you choose (island build in, ceiling extractor or maybe skylift by Faber) can be vital to rest of the works. Nicely pointed by Jonathan the position of the soil stack, another very important for layout and positioning of the sink. All those may be easily resolved if you ask for help professional designer who spends with your family couple of hours and helps you to make correct choices. I hope my post will make an impact and you will show us awesome pictures of your home next year. Good luck!

Hi there, it will be hard to achieve an open floor plan with this side extension . In fact, it seems it would just complicate things in a very expensive way. If you don't need a 4th bedroom every day, but just occasionally for in-laws, can you make the garage into a small, compact guesthouse? If your kitchen feels too small, you might just want to relocate it to the room with the fireplace. I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any further questions, I will be more than happy to help. just drop me a line to service@betterspace.co

Hey Andrei, Thanks for your advice - I should have mentioned that yes we are getting the proper advice, we are choosing an architect at the moment and I will make a note to ask them specifically about the stairs/kitchen fire risk aspect. I totally agree that if the kitchen was moved to the middle room (ie next to the open stairs) it would be ok to have it as the 'passage' to other rooms, however if it isn't a kitchen and is used as living space I'm more concerned about this. I guess because in a kitchen you're probably busy, whereas if you're in living area you're more likely to be relaxing and regular disturbance isnt great? We're not keen on moving the kitchen to another room, I feel it would look really out of place in either the front room with bay window, or the middle room with the open stairs (cooking smells/smoke/noise would travel upstairs easily etc). Equally, we're keen to avoid closing off the stairs too - worried it would make them pretty dark and would also affect the light to the middle room! I think I've narrowed down my worries to being basically that if the current dining room becomes living space, and has a large entrance to the kitchen where the current window is (plus maybe an additional entrance where the current doorway is), it makes the room really hard to use in terms of layout and furniture etc. It won't have much usable wall space and I'm struggling to think of how we could layout anything like storage/some seating, maybe a desk etc. Does that make more sense?

- At porch addition check if you have enough turning space (for the cars) - Choose wisely the design for garage and porch - the front can look too dominating - Most of the boot room will be used for circulation, but it's hard to see another way to do this. Just allow for some windows here for natural light - Consider entrance to garage from porch? See if it works for you - On a longer term consider opening up the utility with the living area, and move the actual facilities to the boot room. Hope the above helps