Thanks for your reply. Your house sounds lovely, it must be an amazing space downstairs.

Thanks for the tip about the garage floor. I like the idea of leaving the front of the garage & I’m thinking of knocking into part of the garage from the dining room & making that into a kitchen/ diner and turning the current kitchen into a family room for the kids. It’ll be interesting to see how much some quotes come in at, should be cheaper than a whole extension! We can hopefully then add a conservatory onto the back of the garage at some point.

Good luck with your new downstairs, i’m looking forward to seeing the new kitchen in place.

We’ve done two major bits of work: firstly knocking through from the dining room into the garage, and from the kitchen into the dining room; and secondly, extending the kitchen out. So we now have one huge room comprising the old garage, the old dining room, the old kitchen, and an extension which is exactly the same size again as the old kitchen.

With the garage knock-through, we didn’t go right to the front of the house; we’ve left the garage door in place with a six foot deep “bike store” behind it. A neighbour has gone to the front though, replacing the garage door with a wall and large window, and it works fine.

The garage floor is lower than the rest of the house, so that has to be built up. Make sure this is done properly with concrete screed, and not just with boards on timbers. This was one mistake we’re now having to rectify.

I couldn’t put exact costs on everything; the kitchen-dining room-garage knock through cost about £10,000, but that included building a large patio area to the side of the garage (we’re on an odd shaped plot). There are double doors in the side of the garage to this, and the rear garage door and dining room door both had to be blocked in.

The extension to the back of the kitchen, doubling it in size, has cost about £20,000 for the building work.

We moved into exactly the same ‘Victoria’ style house as yours 6 months ago & i’m trying to figure out the most cost effective way of gaining more space – I dream of having a bigger kitchen/diner plus a family room!

Have you any recommendations on what to do first? We have 3 small children & could really do with a sofa bed downstairs for guests – would you mind telling me how much it cost you to go into the garage & open up the downstairs & also the new extension. I hope you don’t mind me asking.

many thanks & we’ll keep watching for the next installment.

Clare & Andy Morris