Size isn't everything

week 1

Designing an extension is easy, right? Make the rooms as big as you can afford, ensure there's as much light flowing through as possible, and then fit all the bits and bobs in. You'd be forgiven for not knowing I took years of training to achieve this level of artchitectural design skill.

In all seriousness though, it's not an easy task. We have some very high level ideas of what we want to achieve with our remodel (see here for our overall objectives), but getting from that to something that's coherant and functional as a dwelling is a big leap. How do we tackle big leaps? Well, with gung-ho optimism and a rush of blood to the head, but lets put that aside and take a more pragmatic approach and break it down a little.

Downstairs

Based on our objectives, we need to tick a few boxes downstairs:

• Large, open plan kitchen-dining-living space, open to the garden
• Increased desk space in study
• Open fire or log-burning stove in family area
• Children's playroom, with desk and lots of storage capacity
• Direct access to garage from kitchen/utility room

Looking at our current floorplan, there are a few clear options here:

If we remove the conservatory (we hate it, it serves no real purpose), we have a clear run across the back of the house (and potentially the garage) where we can go out up to 4m while remaining within permitted development rights (i.e. no planning requirement). This would give us a very large open space, especially if we cleared out the walls between the existing kitchen, dining room and utility. It would need an immense amount of steel if we want that to be pillar and/or post free, but would certainly tick the first item on our hitlist with a nice set of sliding or bi-fold doors to the garden. Something like this

Interestingly that picture includes a central fireplace - we could do something similar, but make it open on both sides to give the room a focal point, and zone the living and dining/kitchen areas a bit better than it being one massive open space.

Given the size of that space though, it probably makes sense to sacrifice the existing lounge to satisfy the need for a playroom. It's a big space (probably too big really), but would have great scope for supporting both kids (and minimizing conflict as they get older, as they could have one end each!). That just leaves the study problem.

This area is a bit trickier as we don't really want to extend at the front of the house (although we're considering a porch off the hall to give us a bit of an additional barrier to the elements). We could go into the garage and reduce the size of that area (I have grand plans here for a gym; cinema room; or workshop, so I'm avoiding this option if I can). The other possibly viable option we came up with here was to take the existing downstairs toilet out and bolt that space onto the study, coming out to the edge of the understairs cupboard. That would mean we have to find a home for the toilet, which may play nicely into the area behind the garage - we could make that a utility space, with the toilet tacked on the end, and still leave an expansive kitchen space behind the existing line of the house.

That's looking relatively good as a starter for 10. There are going to be challenges with the expanse of open space in the kitchen, which may need something to break it up (the fireplace might be an option there to split the amount of steel required to hold up the 1st floor), but as a forst draft goes to have something to discuss with the architect, we're [retty happy with that.

Next time, we'll take a look at the first floor and see if we can get to something equally as funcitonal without too much anguish.