I agree with Jonathan, you probably aren't going to get everything you want. My plan leaving the shower room and swapping the kitchen and bathroom is good. It leaves you a good sized bathroom for three beds, and a separate shower room. We all prefer our own plans and I like mine because i've used every inch possible. Plus, I only knocked down one small wall down between kitchen and living and put one wall up to make two bedrooms at the front. The master gets a nice big window with a private patio....nice feature. It also utilises the side entrance as a pantry gaining space in the kitchen. However, as Jonathan says either of the plans with no extension will leave an undersized living / kitchen / dining area. Thus an extension is necessary, but even that's pushing it. The budget just isn't going to stretch to all of the work in one go. I'm guessing you can just about do all the internals, which requires a new kitchen and bathroom, neither of which you could go mad on. Some of the rooms need better windows as you pointed out. It would still leave the undersized space at the rear, which would require an extension at some point, but the bulk of the work would be done. Either way, it's a very tight budget, it's an old house, and stuff crops up in those all the time that you don't expect. A healthy budget to achieve all, including the extension............with a contingency included for small disasters should be £60-80K

I don’t want to pour cold water on your plans but the soil pipe position dictates the location of your wc. You can get a macerator to allow a different wc location (I have had them with no problems) but they are quite unpopular on this site. I also feel that you are getting rid of the small wc only to make the shower room feel cramped. You should also check with an estate agent that the local market doesn’t demand a bath because you don’t want to cause problems on resale. As far as the open plan thing goes your open to the hallway plan won’t be allowed in anything other than a ground floor flat because of fire regs as you need a safe escape from bedrooms. I have an alternative suggestion which is to make the kitchen a shade smaller, make the WC bigger and add a laundry cupboard next to the wc. Of course any changes require budget. Do you have one in mind?

It’s probably not damp. It’s probably loose plaster. The picture shows some wall paper with some modern plaster stuck to it. I would bet that at some point the plasterwork wasn’t great, they patched the bad bits and then skimmed the lot. A few years later it needs doing again. Take off the lining paper and call a plasterer.

Thank you for sharing Kate. We are aware and know that any final plans will have to work with existing service points. Hopefully, we will pull together one or two floor plans to share with a building contractor who is well versed in ex-local reno before sharing our application with the councils planning team. I did read on our council website that they have two teams - one that deals with planning and another that you can seek advice from before putting in an application. I think there is a fee to use the second service (much smaller than the actual planning fee) but they will give us a very strong idea whether our plans are likely to be approved or not.