I prefer #3 most. Who wouldn't? I do appreciate #2 as opposed to a client who is a moving target. A tricky lot is a lot where the customer is "Pie In The Sky" in regards to what is possible on the lot. I recently visited with a customer who wanted a 3-car garage home on a zero lot line property. LOL! "Reality check please!". I hope the next guy can get it through to her. Restrictions? As in CCRs? Not really. Just as long as I have a clear understanding of them. I once sat in on a plan review where the committee members where, as we say here in Texas, "Shooting from the hip", IE, making crap up as they go along and straying away from the published restrictions. I wrangled them back in except for one guy who got sort of belligerent with me. I love my job. I love it when the HOA wants to beat me up. LOL.

I'm sure experts will be able to provide better guidance but we are working through the same thing at the moment and as a very rough estimate for you it's about £1500 per square meter for a single storey extension. We are knocking the existing kitchen and creating a 45m2 extension (side return and extending further out the back) and a rough estimate for that is about £60k-£80k. Loft conversions including an ensuites are generally somewhere between £35k-£50k depending on requirements and size etc. We are south west of London so prices might be slightly cheaper. Hope that helps a bit!

Interesting comments here. We work very closely with property developers to help them place the right level of 'lifestyle-technology' in their properties to meet the expectations of the prospects that either travel to have a house-viewing or even buy off plan. Some of the more affordable successes we've seen have included: A small lighting controller to do scenes in the high footfall areas [kitchen/sitting/master-bed]. Check out: Lightwave comes with an app and can be programmed WiFi: get this everywhere with well placed access points, this will appeal to prospective family owners Door entry: try a new WiFi doorbell that has an app. Try Ring Home cinema: have you seen how cheap you can buy a cinema set up for? Drop into John Lewis or a electrical retailer All you are doing is delivering a measured 'wow-factor' that reflects the potential lifestyles BUT talking about this in all your promotional material: "never come home to a dark house" - "Holiday mode" - "WiFi everywhere" ...and so on. Good luck

Hi Zoe, What a beautiful house- such a striking and interesting shape! Have you just moved in? I agree with Jonathan and Daisy above about maybe painting the windows, I think it would really soften the dark colours and provide some nice contrast. We have been through a similar process in the last 6 months and I got myself quite 'tied up' in trying to make the right decision as I knew it would be a big investment and desperately didn't want to get it wrong. It's great news that your windows are timber and you can paint them- we had horrible white PVC so have to change them all to get the look we want outside, which is a lot more costly! I think plants would add a lovely bit of interest as a part of the 'finishing touches' but do agree that window colours and perhaps some part render would have a much bigger impact on the overall look. I have to say that we 'cheated' as I am terrible at visualising things and just couldn't work out how it would look in my head and went with the renders option suggested above. We got a RAL colour chart (the one with only one colour per sheet- about £40 from Amazon) and for two weeks sent any of our friends or family who arrived at the house outside with it and without pointing them in one direction or another, asked them to pick their favourite colour against the brick work. We then took the 3 shortlisted colours and found a fab Interior designer to do high quality 3D renders. Once we had the 3D renders it was really easy to decide and we didn't feel there was any risk of making an expensive mistake as we already knew how it would look. We also used the 3D images to decide what to change a very small and ugly window that dominated the front of our house to- thanks to the images and the advice of the designer we ended up with a vast improvement and a pretty faux Juliet balcony to rebalance the proportions on the front of the house. You could try something similar looking at which bits (if any) you'd like to render. It's also worth mentioning that this service from a good designer will only be a few hundred pounds (nowhere near as much as I thought it would be when someone kindly suggested it to me) so for me, was well worth it considering the cost of what we were going to be spending on the materials and labour for getting things changed. Hope it helps :)