I think that sofa shape will not suit your new space very well...but slow down and dream!rome wasn't built in a day!i would work on the kitchen plan...forget about the sofa.the kitchen is permanent...the sofa or location of sofa is not!...Kitchen...function first, then form.If you are not planning on this being your forever home...then don't spent money on moving the boiler, or plumbing or electrics as much as possible (unless there are huge gains to be had in terms of function).Also I think you'll be surprised how much more room there actually is once that wall comes down.I vote to keep the breakfast bar as I think it will really define the space.

Well I may have had an over-reaction last year when I found out the neighbours had rats AK! But it was at the time the apples were falling and they were in the area of the compost bin and I found a hole right on the boundary which a friend said that was a rat hole. Actually just writing that is raising my blood pressure! But anyway, I do have a kitchen sink waste disposal and I do have another compost site at the start of the private lane that leads to my property where I take shrub or hedge cuttings that couldn’t be used for anything else because there’s lots of trees close together. And grass goes to in the council bin and I shred leaves and put them on the borders. I suppose I might have a phobia?? I don’t know how I might have developed one but I certainly feel compelled to fight rats out of my garden!!

Hello! We have done two things which relate to some of the issues you describe. However, I should point out that we don't have a cellar; we have ground around 30cm below our ground floor joists. We have wooden floorboards rather than concrete - but I would imagine concrete would be easier to insulate, perhaps from below, in the ceiling of the cellar? Anyway, this is what we did: We insulated under our floor borads on the ground floor. (Note that not every single one has to be lifted, you lift a few every foot or so). Celotex was inserted between the joists. There is a risk the insulation will fall out onto the ground below, so they cut it slightly too big and then hammer it in. It's wedged in very tight and we have had none fall out two years later. As I wrote in my post above as well, we added angled vent covers outside to reduce the draft coming in under the floorboards. We were very concerned about air cirulation when doing all of this, but we have come to the conclusion that the air circulation is already so large under our ground floor, that the celotex and vent covers aren't really an issue. It's not like we have sealed everything shut, there are still plenty of tiny gaps everywhere. We haven't had any issues with mould or anything like that. The other thing we have done more recently is to balance our radiators. We had the problem that our front room was extremely cold relative to the rest of the house (although we had high spec/high BTU radiators in all rooms). We thought this may have been due to low power on the radiators, but in fact after doing a big rebalancing exercise, it's now the warmest room in the house. We're quite surprised how much of a difference rebalancing makes. There are plenty of guides online which we followed; essentially, what you do is you first check how open each radiator is (check the lockshield valve, not the TSV!). We wrote this down on a piece of paper for each radiator in the house (e.g. "fully open", "3/4 open", etc). We then put the heating on from cold and ran around the house checking which radiator fires up first/last. Made a note of this on paper. We then realised that in our case, although the front room radiator was fully open (which would suggest it should get the hot water first), in fact so were many of the radiators that are closer to the boiler. As a result, the hot water was going to those closer ones first (it takes the easiest route). The solution was to close the lockshield valves on the radiators closer to the boiler (not completely, you do it 1/4 of a turn at a time and check the effect). After a few runs we were able to get to a point where the hot water was filling up the front room radiators first. Now it's great. I hope this can help you! Good luck!

If you want to use these as fireplaces then you will need to get a professional to remove them install a hearth and likely replace the cast iron insert as yours has too many missing pieces to make a repair cost effective. If like me you just like the charm of them and don’t want to use them as a heat source then there is no need to repair them. A chimney balloon is the cheap and quick solution to drafts and debris falling down the chimney. These are easily sourced online.