Hi Shyam, If you are looking to hire a Concept Planner - be mindful of spending money before you have completed on the property ! We have worked on a couple of projects that have ended with the client not ending up buying the property we worked on with them. Fine if you are doing this as a feasibility study and you decide to pull out of the purchase if you can’t do what you want with it - but if your budget is tight ... might be an idea to wait until you have exchanged contracts at the earliest!

Hello sarahmccann72, I think that a toilet where you propose would be really problematic, for two reasons. One is obviously how to vent it, especially since its on the ground floor. And even if you were to somehow be able to vent it, the particular positioning is just off, and you would really end up sending much more on plumbing. What do you think about adjusting the utility area to hive off a guest's bath? That would solve both of these problems actually. Check me out Here for some help.

Not necessarily! I'm sure there's lots you can do with it and you have the benefit of a good sized space/plot and it looks flat and accessible, which is a huge bonus for building work. I wonder whether you really do need to extend into the garage though as it sounds as though there's quite a lot of space at the back that you could work with, and perhaps you could retain the garage and the good storage that comes with that (I know people who have converted garages into living space and later regretted it because of the loss of storage for bikes, garden equipment yadda yadda). To be 100% honest I think your first step is to refine what it is you really want and need in terms of extra space/functionality, define how much money you have to put behind it - and then talk that through with an architect. It sounds like you will need an architect involved at some point anyway, if you're looking at extending at the back, and I think that relationship functions better if you go to them with a clear brief of what you need, rather than a fully formed idea of how to do it. Does that make sense? An architect's role, in part, is to understand your needs and then come up with a solution which meets your brief, in a way which will improve the internal flow and the external look of the house. As a client, part of your role is to be open to the professional's ideas and to assess whether they meet your brief, rather than defining the solutions yourself. So I think worrying about where the front door is, isn't really the issue - and your time/effort is better spent in defining what doesn't work for you in the house at the moment, and what your family's needs are, now and in the future. For example, you mention putting in a shower downstairs, but that's jumping straight to a solution which may not be the best one - an architect will respond to a brief which includes "we need another shower", with a solution which considers the layout of the whole house (it might be that you can get one in upstairs instead). So overall you'll get a better, more considered result than if you say "I want a shower here and I want the front door in the middle", type conversation. I hope that makes sense and doesn't put you off!

Please can you help us figure out how we could make better use of the space upstairs. We’d love to have an en-suite to the master and would like to figure out if it’s possible to rework the space to make the guest bedrooms bigger. They are not square so quite narrow. Not everything possible without an extension but wondered if anyone had any ideas to make better use of space. Thank you