victoria_goulding

To extend or not...Are we crazy?

We’ve decided that we’d like to renovate our kitchen to hopefully make it a more family-friendly and sociable space.

Our plan is to build a small extension across the entire back of the house, squaring off the kitchen and offering access into the living room next door.
We have a couple of concerns - the part of the extension across the living room could feel quite corridor-like and whether there would be enough light at the back of the living room. Our back garden is also not huge and we’d need to consider safe and usable garden access from the extension. We have spoken to an architect who has a number of ideas though.

There’s recently been a spanner in the works as we had a gentleman come round from a local design and build company. He wasn’t really willing to listen to our ideas and was highly opinionated. He basically told us that we would be stupid to spend our money on such a small extension as we already have plenty of space, and that we should instead knock through the kitchen and living room entirely, re-locate the kitchen to the living room and turn the part of the kitchen that currently juts out into a snug, with doors to include and separate it from the kitchen-diner.

Whilst this does sound like a suitable idea, we had planned to turn our sizeable side garden into an outdoor kitchen/patio area with BBQ, pizza oven etc, and walking from one side of the house to the other, via a snug with food doesn’t seem to fit the bill for our vision.

We would also rather maintain the family living room as a separate space, as opposed to knocking the entire wall through.

We’d still prefer to do the extension and would love to have some honest advice and see if anyone has any other ideas. Are we stupid to consider the extension over his idea?

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United Kingdom
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