Take the advice of local estate agents. They may well tell you there is a smaller market for a one bed and advise against losing the second bedroom for fear of down valuing your home.

Reducing the number of bedrooms will reduce the value of your home, but I can see how awkwardly placed the bedroom is and would be lovely to have garden access from the kitchen. You could look on Rightmove to find out how much 1 and 2 bedroom flats go for in your area and use it as a guide. It will also depend how long you plan to stay there.

I would say the same as the others above and seek advice from your local estate agents but if you make the kitchen/diner a showstopper with access to the garden then that may outway the 2nd bedroom

I’d swap the kitchen and bedroom and put doors where the window is from the kitchen to the garden.

Then use the second bedroom as wardrobe/laundry/office space as required.

The rear room is too small to be a bedroom IMHO. Do you have the budget to extend at the rear giving you a kitchen/dining/living room with access to the garden? Then the front reception room would make a good size bedroom.

Perhaps you could make the front room a bedroom, with split your bedroom in two to create a second bedroom, then create a large open plan kitchen - diner - lounge through the middle, and put the bathroom at the back where the current second bedroom is. That way you get 2 bedrooms (second bedroom would be a bit bigger than the current one and in a better location), plus the whole space will feel a lot bigger. This is just a suggestion based on how I would alter it if it was mine. But it's your home so it needs to work for you!

I always recommend that you start off by defining your vision for how you want to live before designing the floorplan. A good taster of my recommended way of doing this is with my free Design Your Home Vision Checklist. You can get that here: https://www.i-architect.co.uk/dyhvchecklist.html

For helpful videos watch my YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@iarchitect

Best wishes with your home redesign!

Jane

chartered architect, eco-home and conservation area specialist

www.i-architect.co.uk

On reflection consider turning the living room into a bedroom and bathroom and then knocking together the whole space at the back to make a kitchen living space

thank you some great options
i could slightly extend into the garden but only a few feet which may help
thank you all so much

Hiya Stacy, I think retaining a second bedroom is important but to get a reasonably sized one, how small are you prepared for the bathroom to be? If you could cope with a fairly thin shower room only, I would make the kitchen slightly narrower and square it off to where the double doors are now, make them a window so the kitchen can fit around the new 3 walls facing the knocked through dining space with doors to the garden. The shower room would go at the end of the corridor, alongside the kitchen and by having shortened the kitchen slightly, the existing bathroom area plus that would make a (more) reasonable bedroom 2.

I'll see if I can draw what I mean. It'd be compact but you'd have a kitchen diner into the garden without extending. Rosy

Someone more expert than me needs to sort out the doors to the kitchen and bathroom but hopefully you get the idea. And hopefully much of your lovely kitchen could be reused.

Just had a quick look on Houzz for small shower rooms and found this:

Duplex Apartment in Rathmines, Dublin https://www.houzz.co.uk/photos/duplex-apartment-in-rathmines-dublin-bathroom-dublin-phvw-vp~164243796