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.

Hi Claire. I confess I'm not very good at kitchen planning! However (ignoring cost of moving plumbing and potential structural changes) have you considered taking 3ft or so from your living room which would still leave you a really decent size room. The plan isn't to scale but gives you a rough idea. I can see you like banquette seats so that's what that is on the plan! I think standard depth units are 60cm and I've copied this re hose etc. On the utility wall you could consider some kind of display or breakfast cabinet in the middle. If the units blend in with the wall as they do in your inspiration pic I don't think it will feel like a utility area in your dining room. http://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/washing-machine-depth-specifications/

Hi there, We had exactly the same problem about 6 months ago and despite all the squared scale paper in the world, I just couldn't imagine how it was going to look and went round and round in circles! Have you considered a concept planner? We used one and despite the fact I was standing in 3 separate rooms with doors, windows and openings in completely different places, she worked off the architect's plans and came up with photo quality 3D renders showing exactly how the different options would look. We even had a YouTube video of the 4 different layouts, so you could see how it would look as you walked around the room. The pics below show the room I was stood in as our concept planner did the 3D renders, how they actually looked and how the room as turned out. I am a huge fan and find the whole thing quite fascinating- it's like looking i to the future :) Thanks to using them, we were able to order our kitchen before the building work was done, so didn't have to go without a kitchen for ages! How the 3 separate rooms looked when the plans were done by our concept planner... A few of the 3D renders that she did at exactly the same time... And how it turned out.. It's completely cheating but it makes it a lot more fun and in our experience a lot less stressful :) Best wishes, Claire

Hi Sasi, What a lovely house. It certainly has a lot of potential. I am sure you would be able to reconfigure entrance. There are several different ways how to go about it. Just few things to be aware of: 1. give yourself a time to work out what is the best layout for you and your family, do not rush this. Perhaps once you move in you will be able to feel the house and identify clearly where is it not serving you well 2. it may be expensive to do all the work at once and you may need to phase it so prepare a masterplan which you can follow, once you have the master plan you will be able to decide on what are the priorities 3. do some good research and hire professional that will help you to identify the problems, suggest cost effective solutions and advise on how to allocate your budget to get the best value Refurbishments and renovations can be stressful and costly so weigh up pros and cons of buying this particular house and if there are too many cons perhaps it is better to keep looking. Good luck anyway, and if you have questions we would be happy to chat. These are important decisions you don't have to make alone. Best Wishes Suzanne & Joe