Hi Rhona, Your kitchen looks fantastic! A bright, bold colour choice in Canary Yellow would look great there. With our roller blinds if you redecorate later or just fancy a change you can swap the fabric of your blind by hooking off the old one and hooking on the new one without replacing the complete system. Well done on such a great transformation, enjoy! Kiera

Thanks Ensign! The magnolia comment was just about a temporary measure as the majority of the room is already magnolia and we have some leftover from recent touch ups to our rental. Definitely won't be magnolia long term. We originally had a room by room plan, but got waylaid as we had to rip out carpets and wallpaper from upstairs immediately to get rid of smells. Downstairs we haven't touched the kitchen/utility, although we have had to strip both halls, again due to smell. With the exception of dealing with the floor, our bedroom will be finished first as it doesn't need any tradesman input. Everything else will have to be done in bits and pieces as and when we can afford to get trades in to plaster/ deal with pointing outside causing damp and so on.

My friend has a house which sounds a simular layout to yours. When you walk in the front door you have the lounge door to the right and stairs and kitchen door directly ahead. She extended the back of the house behind the kitchen and dinning room about 4m, knocked the kitchen and dinning room together and put a wall up between the old dinning room and lounge. She now has a wonderful big sociable kitchen dinner. She has French doors one end (where the original dinner was) with the dinning table in front of them. It's a lovely space with room for a breakfast bar and a 2 seater sofa near the dinning table which backs up to the wall which now divides the lounge. I personally think double doors would have been good to separate the lounge and kitchen but that's because I like the idea of being able to have the whole space open when entertaining, obviously down to personal choice. I don't know if you have a garage but she divided her garage and put a utility room at the back of the garage and the front of the garage is used for storage. She also has another extension off the back of the garage about 6m which gives room for a WC and a kids playroom and she has a door off of that room leading to the garden. It's great as the kids can go from their playroom to the garden without going through the kitchen.

Thanks Jonathan. That's definitely one of the options for the long term as we are planning on extending into the loft to move guest or master there. We are thinking about extending to the side of the kitchen (to the left) and incorporate the back reception room so that the open plan kitchen/dining/lounge is L-shaped. And then we could have the existing dining/breakfast room as really nice laundry/mudroom/dogroom with the back door into there. Alternatively, keep the back reception as it is (formal dining or separate lounge for growing kids), keep the dining in the breakfast room and extend out to the right to make kitchen a little bit bigger (big enough for island between galley sides), big glass doors to garden, etc - but also add on space to the right to make separate laundry/mudroom/back entrance. Above that we'd put ensuite and walk-in closet onto current master. And this is why I don't know what to do with the current 'temporary' kitchen solution - in all likelihood it will be there fore 3-5 years, so don't want it to be just thrown up without thinking about it, but I also don't want to have to re-do work later, and I especially don't want to take down period features and ruin room proportions for a 'temporary' fix. And of course we need to know what we want to do before we can get the electrician round to re-wire the house, so it's not something I can consider for too much longer...