Making our house a home - The Start

We sold our old home in December 2013, (in the hope of emigrating to New Zealand) and moved into a rented house. Location was key when we were looking due to the boys being in school, we didn't mind about look, that it wasn't detached or even having only 3 bedrooms, the location was the most important.  Over a short period of time we grew to love this house and plans for New Zealand were going slow and kept hitting hurdles, the living life in limbo soon got to us and we decided to see if we could buy our rented house and stay, the boys were happy and so were we.  We approached our landlord and they agreed and the decision was made, we were staying.......

We purchased our rented house in November 2014, a year after renting it, it was great we already knew all the little quirks of the house and that it fitted us, just..  We bought the house knowing we were going to extend it, it currently has 3 bedrooms so two of the boys share, they really needed their own rooms so started working out how we could add a bedroom.. easier said than done in a 3 storey town house.  And so various builders were rang, show houses and google were visited for inspiration and the plans to extend the house were growing every way we could.  It was only when we had an estimation of all the ideas we wanted we had a huge reality check and things were scaled back, due to the money tree at the bottom of the garden being not so fruitful, lol. 

And so we found a builder David Backhouse, we explained what we wanted and worked with him to get things within our budget.  What was great was we didn't need plans drawing or planning permission, which saved us money to use towards the build.

The plan is:

Ground floor - to remove the conservatory and extend the rear of the property by 3m, and to merge this with the utilty and playroom to create a big family kitchen, breakfast day area.  The utility room would then move into the back of our internal garage.  I have now also added a new door from the hallway into the garage as can see the garage being converted in the near future.

First Floor - This currently has our kitchen, dining and living room which will get converted into the master bedroom and en-suite with a slightly smaller living room.

Second Floor - This will eventually end up being 3 double bedrooms a family bathroom and a small spare room, hopefully.

The build started Saturday 2nd May.

Thanks for reading :-)