Sharon, who only recently bought her 1930s semi-detached home in Pendlebury, is anxious about the fact it has a small kitchen that does not connect to the dining room. Furthermore, the ground floor rooms overlook the neighbouring property, meaning that Sharon’s privacy is compromised. In addition, the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms are neither arranged to reach their full floor space or storage potential.
This all means that Sharon is keen to reconfigure and redesign her home to make it more light and user friendly, while maximising on the existing available space. Due to budget constrictions, an extension was not an option.
>A keen host and cook, Sharon’s main priority is to increase the functionality of the kitchen, make it more sociable and add extra worktop space and views looking out into the garden that are more pleasant for both her and visitors to the home.
>The current downstairs layout comprises a living room that runs from front to rear, a side staircase and separate dining and kitchen spaces located in a rear extension. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms, a box room and a bathroom with a separate toilet area.
Finding herself short on home improvement ideas, Sharon contacted Magda at Pride Road to devise a set of solutions to help her get the best out of her new semi-detached home. Keen to assist, Magda conducted a bespoke Concept Design Workshop to look at ways to redesign the house, making it perfect for Sharon and her needs.
Are you keen to follow in Sharon’s footsteps? We have lots of ideas to help you redesign your home.
After carefully listening to Sharon’s concerns, Magda designed and presented a set of options to redesign and reconfigure both the ground and first floor living spaces.
All plans are to scale
Here, we looked at minimum effort to achieve maximum impact because Sharon had only just installed new windows and doors so we had to work carefully around them. One of the doors was facing the neighbours so we decided to move it to the other side of the house and block up the resulting space.
Internally, we alighted on the idea of knocking through the existing wall and demolishing the chimney breast to gain more space in the dining room.
We then designed an ‘L-shaped’ kitchen to make best use of the walls, which were formed from a previous single skin brick extension. This meant that we did not increase the size of the kitchen so much as improve the configuration, making it more user friendly and open to the dining room. In the dining room, we placed a table near the window so it would be bright and welcoming for Sharon’s guests. Are you thinking of ways to add more light to your home? Look no further than our top tips.
We went on to improve the views to the garden by moving one of the new windows from the side to the rear of the house. This means that Sharon would no longer need to look into her neighbour’s kitchen while performing everyday household tasks.
We then created a little room for Sharon’s dogs under the stairs, rather than having a big cage located in the middle of the ground floor. Meanwhile, in the living room, we considered a new arrangement for the television and sofas.
In this proposal, we flipped the kitchen to the other side of the room and made sure that the sink overlooked the garden rather than the neighbours. We continued the worktop space throughout the kitchen and dining areas to make sure we squeezed the maximum we could out of them.
In the dining area, we introduced a long dining table with a bench that can easily be pulled out for visitors and concealed underneath the rest of the time. All of this was done to ensure that Sharon would be able to entertain guests comfortably and to her heart’s content.
We kept the space for the dogs under the stairs with an entrance coming in from the hallway, rather than the kitchen.
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Sharon is willing to compromise here, downsizing from three to two larger bedrooms, all in favour of gaining a bigger bathroom. If you’re in doubt, we have information all about how to wisely invest in your home.
We also looked at moving the utility room upstairs and housing it in the former toilet room. Then we opened the existing bathroom up to incorporate the little box bedroom before going through a range of options, which included enhancing the storage in the bedrooms.
We discovered it was possible to fit a full-width wardrobe in the rear garden facing bedroom, all with the added bonus of being able to recess it next to the chimney breast. In the main front bedroom, we added shallow shelves rather as a deeper wardrobe would have projected into the lovely bay window there. We then placed an extra wardrobe into the utility room and that worked well.
We shuffled the layout of the bathroom to look at the best places to locate the bathtub, shower, washbasin and new toilet.
We proposed here to move the master bedroom to the rear of the house for added privacy, while converting the little box room into a walk in wardrobe. As a result, the main bathroom would be slightly smaller with a shower installed above the bathtub.
Here, we moved the door to the front master bedroom to allow for the bed to be repositioned in the middle of the room, meaning that all of the wardrobes would be able to sit flush along one wall. This option was the least invasive and results in a spacious room with plenty of storage.
Sharon was very happy that we were able to draw these ideas for her. We went through all of the options together and it pushed us towards different directions, solving various issues to create maximum impact and space.
We are aware that redesigning a house can seem an enormous task. This is why we have all the information you need to successfully alter your home.
Sharon will now obtain quotes from builders, consider her options and make an informed decision on how to best proceed with her dream home project. Our plans are hand drawn to scale so that clients and builders can measure from them to get those crucial first cost estimates.
Sharon says: “I really needed help with thinking about how I could remodel the space in the house, particularly having a kitchen diner in the existing kitchen. It made me think about options I would never have considered, including how to remodel where the bathroom and the box room are to create a bigger bathroom and have a utility space upstairs. It was good to just have the opportunity to spend the time thinking about what is possible with the house.”
Would you like to redesign your house to create better light, functionality and space? Book a workshop today.
"It made me think about options I would never have considered, including how to remodel where the bathroom and the box room are to create a bigger bathroom and have a utility space upstairs. It was good to just have the opportunity to spend the time thinking about what is possible with the house.”
Sharon
“I really needed help with thinking about how I could remodel the space in the house, particularly having a kitchen diner in the existing kitchen."
"Sharon was very happy that we were able to draw these ideas for her."
"We went through all of the options together and it pushed us towards different directions, solving various issues to create maximum impact and space."
Pride Road
