TRADESMEN. It's a miracle when one bothers to quote at all ... as such, I now build walls, can plaster, and drive a digger lol... I tile, fit carpets, fitted the kitchen, all with only half of one of my lower spinal discs left. By the time you get a quote back, its more often a month or more down the line and have already hired a couple of lads on a daily rate doing things how you dictate after weeks of research. I hired a roofer to replace my cast iron guttering with aluminium ones, he put up new soffits and fascias BADLY, ran off to assume weigh in my old gutters and ran off with the money for my new ones - steep learning curve there, and a CCJ is no use getting my money back. I purchased a kitchen, it turned up in bad shape, then commenced over 8 months to get to court for my money back... Hired a tree co to remove a load of trees overhanging the house and clear the boundary... an old man cried about a tree that wasnt his anyway so the tree folk abandoned the job. Thankfully I have a great electrician and a reliable plumbing company, but only call them for either gas or. heavier electrical work.... the husband does to electrics and plumbing but he hates it and we do get it checked. I keep trying to find a good builder though. Everything takes so long and its physically and mentally draining on me.... I would MUCH rather have someone I can trust but no luck yet.

Thank you for everyone's comments, had no idea this thread would prove so popular when I started it. We are plastering this week and we have finally bought most things for the kitchen. I did find some real 'finds' though if anyone is looking. Not sure where you are based, but regarding electrical goods we researched all our own and narrowed down our list, and once we had that we looked online for the best prices for each appliance. Instead of buying from lots of different places we took it to Bentalls, who not only matched, but also cost us less, and beat some online prices with a good 'deal' price they also then will hold on to them until you need them, but if anything goes wrong you have 'bentalls' rather than several online dealers to return items to. RDO Appliances also do this if there is one near you, but i'd advise you to research prices first. Another thing we found was inserts for the kitchens. Through our kitchen supplier these were expensive, bin inserts, pull out drawers, pull out larders, even the pop up sockets, sourced seperately through ebay and online we managed to save quite a lot of money by doing this, so our fitter will still have the right things on the day, but we are not getting the inserts from the supplier. What else..... erm kitchen worktop, unbelievably the exact same worktop, same material, same cut outs etc.. same sizes differed between suppliers by 3k! so do shop around for your quartz and granite.

Yes you are right in your interpretation. Sorry, I've taken existing plans and pencilled all over them. We were going to set the garage further forward, but it makes the kitchen too dark by taking away that window over the sink. By setting it further back, it also bypasses the drainage from the bathroom above the kitchen (waste drainage comes down to the right of the side door). Our original plans were to do as you suggest with a two storey extension, but realistically, if we did that, we would have to relocate / downsize the (new) bathroom and reconfigure the upstairs layout almost entitely at which point it becomes unviable to do so. Our problem is that every possibility we consider seems to have issues such as leaving useless space at the back of the garden or leaving very little garden space, or having an odd internal layout. We could potentially extend on the other side too (we are probably set on this side due to not wanting to see the neighbours ugly extension!) but we can't really see how that could work for room layout either. I'll attach upstairs to follow. Thanks!

I levelled my garden, a paved area of roughly 6m x 6m that sloped upwards 2 1/2 feet. We also got crazy quotes for digging it out, which thanks to the joys of a London terrace had to be done completely by hand with bags of dirt carried through my kitchen. We ended up managing that part ourselves with help from casual, non-builder labour. (Turns out the guys at the local gym don’t earn much, have some spare hours, and have lots of friends in the same boat.). I studied up on retaining walls and became convinced that a timber retaining wall would work. We bought treated timber through Jackson’s Fencing using their slotted fence posts for support. The retaining wall/ new fence was professionally installed, but they had very little digging to do to tidy up the removed area. Six years later it’s still going strong and I fully expect it to last.