smemmy

Design ideas for 1970s house

Smemmy
2 years ago

Hi. I have read many questions here and am so appreciative of all the answers you provide to strangers. I'm hoping to get some ideas for the floor plan of our house. We are looking to renovate with following criteria:

- at least 1 extra bedroom

- a better laundry (currently a cupboard outside, below the kitchen window)

- at least 1 extra toilet

We have exposed beams and raked ceilings in the rumpus, lounge room, dining, kitchen and meals, which are features we love about the house. We currently only have the meals set up as dining area, which is a bit small when we have visitors but fine for our family. The house is raised except for the rumpus (a previous owner's extension) which is built on a slab. The sunroom is a flyscreen add on. The house has been built on a very unusual angle on the block, with little options to extend to rear or south.


We have found that visitors tend to sit in the meals area as it has the best bush view in the house and is close to the kitchen. Ideally we'd like to take advantage of the northerly aspect (there is an access driveway to bush next to us, so it is a bit of a distance to the neighbour's house) and the western bush views. What would you do? Alternatively, can you give us some pros and cons to our current ideas?

- knock out bedrooms 2, 3 and bathroom/ toilet --> Convert to lounge room with access to garden. This would be one large open plan area with kitchen, but split level. Convert rumpus to two bedrooms, lounge to 1 bedroom, dining to a bathroom with access from hallway near bedrooms, and a laundry accessed from kitchen (through current door). I'm concerned about how dark/tunnel-like the entrance will be..

- leave floorplan as is, convert rumpus to two bedrooms, connect garage to house (possibly through walk in - add built in into master) (the garage is slightly further west than indicated in the house plan and may not be parallel to the main build)

- make a u shaped kitchen with built in cabinets where fridge currently us, to enlarge the meals area into a proper (but narrow 2.9m wide) dining area

- extend (laundry/bath) next to rumpus (this area is quite close to fence boundary, hence the current dip at the front of the rumpus) Ideally we would like to avoid changing the footprint of the house, but we will consider it if needed.


At the moment we can see pros and cons to all solutions and are wondering if there are any other options?

Obviously budget will also come into things, so our extreme solution is to knock down rebuild in a similar style, to keep with the local houses and the features we love, or perhaps just learn to live with the features as they currently are.

One other concern - heating and cooling. But I know we can't have everything ;)


Thanks in advance for any ideas you might give us (and apologies if this question is far too broad for the forum!)


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