Kitchen / living room or a large kitchen?

Sadie.ie

Hi everyone,

Looking to get some opinions. We are planning to renovate the downstairs of our house next year. We want to add a 20 square metre extension to the back of the house. It is a 3 bed roomed semi detached house located in Dublin. At the moment it has a dinning area & a separate very narrow kitchen. We plan to knock down the dividing wall & extend out into the garden. We may need to leave up a pillar in the centre of the extension as it is part of the supporting wall. We have 2 ideas. Make the whole space an open plan large kitchen with a utility room or a smaller kitchen area with a tv room looking out into the garden minus the utility room. We really can't decide which to do. We have a 10 year old son & a 2.5 year old daughter & I'm thinking how would the space work best for us. Has anyone had to make this decision & what did you do in the end? Is a living room in the front of the house & another at the back better or just the one living room & a large kitchen? We aren't sure about getting an architect to help with this decision as we are hoping to keep costs down with things being so expensive as it is.

Any input / advise is most welcome

Sadie

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Rows Grower

Big kitchen and some comfortable seats away from the kitchen table to watch the kitchen TV would be my advice.

arsebiscuits82

Open plan all the way. we built a few years ago. Our house is basically a t shape with the down bit of the t an open plan kitchen dining living room with a vaulted ceiling over the dining/living area.

we love it, granted it was a new build so we had the space but we never leave it.

whoever gets home first starts cooking, when the other comes in you can chill on the couch with the kids and still talk to the other half about how the day went.

Our sitting room is mostly used to hang clothes up in to dry..

wildwillow

Open plan kitchen and living works well but needs a good sized utility to take all the noisy and messy stuff. Do you have a separate sitting room or is that the entire ground floor?

Flinty997

If the kids have their own bedrooms for future study /personal then the need for 2nd separate space downstairs isn't needed. You have the open plan and front room as two spaces.

So open plan everytime for me. But also would want a good sized utility for utility stuff. Also plenty of storage. Open plan isn't great if there's stuff hanging around all the time.

Sadie.ie

Thank you for your replies. We do already have a living room at the front of the house which has dividing doors into the dinning area. We were thinking of sealing that wall up so we would have room for the kitchen to be built in. The space we are working with might have a pillar in the middle of the room as it’s part of a supporting wall which makes deciding where everything is going to go a bit awkward.

Just to add we do have the garage for our washer / dryer. Maybe a large press in the kitchen / living area we could keep ironing board, Hoover etc

Sadie.ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120430073#Comment_120430073

We have a separate living room at the front of the house. We have our washer & dryer in out garage so we just need storage for the hoover, mop, ironing board etc so a closet might do that for us. I was thinking a second living area in the kitchen might be useful as the kids grow up & have friends over they could perhaps use the front room. It would mean our kitchen space would be smaller with a living area included so that's what we are trying to decide. More spacious kitchen or smaller kitchen area combined with a living area?