Swap lounge with kitchen dining room. take out the wall dividing the K/D. Add an alternative exit in south wall by the stairs. Take down conservatory and extend across. Assume you can build over garage + alternative 1st floor remodelling + loft extension. Moss Extend t. 02072349350 e. info@moss-architecture.com

Thank you all for your thoughts / advice! We are yet to move in but we know the house needs rewiring and a few new windows etc so we are keen to get started as soon as we get the keys. I agree the bay window is a lovely feature and I’ve been looking at creating a bench seat with a small table for our every day family dining and then I am wanting something larger to host dinner for our extended family as we have quite a large family and would love to host Christmas and birthdays etc. The kitchen is clean and well looked after, just needs modernising to our taste. There is no immediate rush to replace it unless of course we extend / move things around. I also have my own business that involves cake decorating so creating an island or space so that I could work from home would be a reason for us to extend the kitchen. I think you’re right in that we need to live in the house for some time and get a feel of which areas we are wasting / not utilising and decide from there.

What would you do with this floorplan? We want to get rid of our conservatory so it’s a chance to optimise space- which we need! It’s not ever going to be huge so we need clever ideas! We would like kitchen/dining and 2 ‘tv’ areas. We do need to retain the garage as we don’t have a loft. We are planning on staying for probably 5 years so would like to do the option that adds the most value. One of our current issues is how to use back half of through lounge We are a bit restricted by a small garden and a drain run parallel to house means it’s either a max 1.5m extension or min 3+m extension. We also have the soil pipe and chimney to work around. Our garden is west facing. Any ideas?

Just on the chimney point. We knocked through between our kitchen and small sitting room. We needed a structural engineer to specify the steel. as part of the work they took out a similar chimney and supported the chimney higher up with a diagonal steel. the whole job was £15k and the diagonal steel wasnt itemised but we had the wall taken out, new plaster throughout, lights, new floor, radiators etc included. so i guess a couple of thousand pounds for the chimney removal to first floor.