Depending on how far you budget goes, I would look at adding traditional cornice and pelmet and replacing the plinth with a similar oyster colour. End panels for wall units could also be replaced / added. Some chessboard style tilling in 3 colours would also bring out the walls. It's hard to tell but is the oak surround also on the wall units? I haven't checked your location but this is something we can help with

Hi Jenny, What a great project! When do you get to move in? There's some fab advice above from all the pros already and whilst I'm definitely not a professional I thought it might help to share a little bit of our experience having been through almost exactly the same thing in the last 6 months and had to learn a lot very quickly! We purchased a property with a kitchen and dining space that looked almost identical to yours, both in style (!!) and structure! We had the part walls in the kitchen whereby some walls had been taken out in the past leaving nibs here and there. I've posted quite extensively in some of the other threads that Gina has listed above, so I won't give you all that detail again but if you read them and have any questions at all, just shout. All the comments above, especially from Jonathan about budget are great advice. I really would start by having a think about what you have to spend now and also what you want to spend over time to complete the project. Are you buying to make into your family home or are you thinking of selling in the midterm? I completely agree with Karen above about the structural engineer and you will almost (!!) certainly need one, so I would start asking around for recommendations and speak to a few people if you can. If you don't know of any already asking your estate agent or the company that did the survey on the house you're buying is a good place to start. Our experience was they also work a number of weeks/ months in advance so well worth starting that process. However... the part I would disagree with slightly would be when to get a concept planner and / or interior designer on board. Structural engineers are expensive, they are also very technical and my advice would be that you know what you want or have a couple of specific options before you have them around. They charge per calculation so they are not the best people to be exploring options with. A concept planner will spend time discussing what you really want for your space and how you want to live in it, both now and in the future. They can then look at the whole space you have available and make recommendations as to how you could achieve that. We used Gina from Create Perfect (above) and got her on board right at the start. We were considering extending and I was 95% certain that would be what we were going to do. We also had walls that I was 95% certain we wanted to take down. What Gina did was relook at the space and after a lot of discussions about our life and what we really wanted she came up with 6 different layouts to achieve that. We had images of each of the different layouts along with the pros and cons of each, based on what we were looking to achieve. What surprised me was how she took our brief and came up with ideas I would never have thought of (and believe me, I'd be slightly embarrassed to tell you how many hours I'd spent with a pencil and squared, scaled paper!) We didn't end up extending and we didn't end up taking down the walls I thought we would. She helped us create a superb space and by being clever about the space we spent only £14k on structural building work (not including fees) rather than the £40-50k we were looking at to extend. If we'd waited until later in the project to get her onboard we would have missed the opportunity to look at things differently and would have had far less of the budget left to do the other things that needed doing. Hope it helps and any questions at all just shout- everyone is super keen to help and I know what a massive help it was to me having advice from people who'd been through similar experiences when I was a complete novice! Best wishes, Claire

Hi, i think you need to contact the glass makers. Some companies provide fire resistant glass depending on your needs and specifications: https://www.pilkington.com/en-gb/uk/products/product-categories/fire-protection

I guess this will come down to how much you want to spend, if you are prepared to do an extension out the back then assume you are comfortable with some structural work. Also if you are happy to lose the garage or some of it you actually have a much larger space to work with. If it were my house and I had the budget to do a complete ‘rejig’, i would do the following: 1. Push the bathroom, utility area and storage areas into the garage but still leaving a garage door with a much smaller ‘garage’ space for stuff we just dump in the garage. Add a door if possible to the garage much closer to the front door to access the storage area. Access the bathoorm and utility via the currently under stairs door. 2. Now move the kitchen to the right into the space currently occupied by the bathroom and study, creating space for a nice size island, room fo an American fridge freezer and tall cupboards etc. 3. Move the study to the left hand side, which would run from the garden wall where the first bifolds end down to the existing vertical beam column, effecitvely making use of this as part of that study and therefore it isnt just a column in the middle of the room. 4. You will be left with a large L shaped kitchen lounge diner, where you can either choose to have a play area in front of the kitchen or tv snug and dining area to the left of it or vice versa. Whatever suits! Obviously this is without seeing the actual spaces and room dimensions to see how much open space you would get but looks like could work from your floor plan. Maybe too much work though :)