Hi Jenny, We went through a very similar process 6 months ago (and are still mid renovation) so can share our experience with you if it helps. We went around and around in terms of what and who you need and in what order, including architect, structural engineer and Interior designer and found it very difficult to work out what we needed. With some help we got there in the end and have learnt quite a bit in the process about the different options and also costs!!! There are probably a couple of questions that are key before anyone can really share any helpful advice ... Do you need planning permission for any of the renovations you want to do? Do any of the alterations you want to make include structural walls? (If you don't know that's fine and also helps determine who you need to consult) Do you want creative input / design advice on actual layout or do you already know what you want to do? (Again if you don't know then that also helps determine who you need to consult) Once people know a bit of the above I'm sure we can help :)

This is really a very nice space and your house is a "very very very fine house, with two cats in the yard..", lovely. If they are still small I would leave a big lawn for the kids, it also gives a good natural feel to the place with shrubs around and maybe a little treehouse for climbing and hiding. I would not do explicit round forms, because it looks artificial. But maybe it would be a good idea to first get some inspiration from garden books by your great garden designer Penelope Hobhouse or from "Family Garden", a book by the Royal Horticultural Society. The patio and the driveway look a little dull, because the pavement is very massive. Maybe some roses and Viburnum tinus against the house wall could break it up a little. I think decking doesn't go well with this type of house. The pavement itself looks neutral and easy keeping, so why bother replacing it. The garden looks neglected, but that doesn't mean it has to be redone from scratch.

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

Architect first, to advise on options / feasibility / budget. No point in getting quotations without the work being clearly specified / drawn first. That's just depending on guesswork by the tradespeople.