A bigger kitchen and diner in 1930s semi

[russella]

Evening all,

Hopefully this is the right place for this, and someone can give us some thoughts on this one - we're in a pretty modest 1930s semi detached, we've knocked through the teeny-tiny galley kitchen and dining room at the back of the house, but we're still left with what feels like a really undersized kitchen diner space.

Obvious option is to extend out the back, but can't really bear to lose the garden space (or maybe it's can't bear to gain the debt! )

So is the below idea craziness? Basically we move the dividing wall between living room and kitchen - create a smaller "snug" living room, and give us a much bigger kitchen / dining space? A quick play around with Ikea kitchen designer, for what it's worth, suggests it might work?

Would really appreciate some thoughts or suggestions.

 

[Ian H]

I’d do that.

My daughter is doing similar but not putting the wall back

 

[mrrusty]

The problem will be this intermediate wall is almost certainly structural, so is going to need plans, calcs, building control etc. Might be cheaper to build a little extension.

 

[elisa123]

Agree with mrrusty. How much space would you gain by moving the wall? We just got smaller stackable dining chairs which made a lot of difference.

 

[russella]

The problem will be this intermediate wall is almost certainly structural, so is going to need plans, calcs, building control etc. Might be cheaper to build a little extension.

It is indeed a load bearing wall - span looks like it's about 4m. So we'd turn a roughly 3m x 2.6m dining area into a 3.8m x 2.6m? Another issue we'd have with an extension is we're on a floodplain, so from what our neighbours are doing it looks like foundations get expensive. We're guessing structural work being 5-10k, vs an extension being 20-30k? From your comment it sounds like we might be a million miles out on that.

The big problem is we've got two kids, our eldest is about to start secondary school, and I feel like the house needs another "heart" that's away from the TV but not squirreled away in their rooms, where they can get homework done, we can do family games, etc. The current flow of hallway > kitchen > dining room doesn't feel great for that, vs hallway > bigger dining room > kitchen.

 

[mrrusty]

I think your structural work is low, once you factor in sorting out all the mess it will make, and your extension costs high. If you are reasonable DIYers, why not go and get some building estimates to do all the major work to give you a shell of an extension, and then do the fit-out as a mix of DIY and pulling in trades for a day or two like sparks, and plasterer. e.g. a 3x4m single storey extension isn't going to have much more than £6-8K of actual materials in it, so it's the labour element you can eat in to if you can plan to do some work yourself.