Lounge/Dining Room Revamp

[Bon]

Sorry missed the dimensions in your earlier post At 20ft wide its a decent enough width but the actual dimensions of the living and dining rooms may help. If its about 15ft front to back on those rooms then I'm guessing the lounge is no more than about 15ft x 10-12ft which isn't particularly big if you take out a chunk with a lobby area

From your outside picture why not out a new "front" door on the side wall - would be far more pleasant than opening straight out onto the street regardless of any porch etc

Hmm, I like that idea! Got me wondering why they didn't do it like that when they did the conversion in the first place!

The only thing I woldn't be keen on is the "bricked up" appearance left by the removed front door. As I know nothing about brickwork, would a decent brickie be able to remove the lintel and make it look like there was never a dorr there? I'm guessing the whole front of house would need sand-blasting to make this work.

Maybe check if you need planning for moving a door entrance?

if you dontl; want to change the whole outside look , you could presumably leave the door there on the outside but just brick over internally so keep the same look outside with a little sign pointing towards you new front door perhaps. Sure someone with more building knowledge can advise better

Even better, a "trick" front door!!! Seriously though, I think moving the front door is a little beyond what we're looking to do. We do have a pantry-type space in the kitchen which looks like it used to be a doorway through, but due to the angle of the re-built gable wall I'm not so sure if it could be used for that purpose again.

Tonight's job is to get a decent sketch done and posted on here. I'll do the whole Ground Floor.

 

[Bon]

Righto, for those interested, here's the sketchup of the Ground Floor with dimensions

Untitled

• Bon
• 15 Apr 2010
• 1

 

[ColJack]

moving the front door round the side poses the problem of floor height..
from what I can see from the picture the floor height ( or at least the existing door threshold ) is about 4 or 5 brick courses up at the corner..

is that side area your land or an access?

wow.. you must paint fast.. one pic on google earth street view has your windows and door in a bad state of repair in a nasty brown colour and a grey drainpipe, the next one up the street has it all nicely painted in green with a green drainpipe..


there's certainly presitent for moving the door, the house on the other end of your terrace has had it blocked up and moved...

 

[Bon]

moving the front door round the side poses the problem of floor height..
from what I can see from the picture the floor height ( or at least the existing door threshold ) is about 4 or 5 brick courses up at the corner..

is that side area your land or an access?

wow.. you must paint fast.. one pic on google earth street view has your windows and door in a bad state of repair in a nasty brown colour and a grey drainpipe, the next one up the street has it all nicely painted in green with a green drainpipe..


there's certainly presitent for moving the door, the house on the other end of your terrace has had it blocked up and moved...

Yes the height is quite different so some some of step arrangement would need to be built too, which would probably impact on the ability to draw our cars down there.

We also think that the other end of the terrace is how ours might have looked before the conversion from 2 houses to 1.

We are in the process of trying to find out who owns the land at the side. So far we've found out that it's not registered to anyone. There was something in our deeds when we bought the house that mentioned access to a horse drawn fire-cart, however we've also been told by HSBC (mortgage provider) that house deeds no longer exist and all the details are held by the Land Registry now so presumably the horse-drawn cart thing will have been removed as they don't exist anymore?? You certainly couldn't get a car down the side and around the back of the house. We've maintained it for the last 5 years and the previous owner had done so for the last 20.

I'm not sure what happened with the Google Street View pics as getting the window frames painted was a nightmare. We had a decorator lined up to do it, then I got made redundant so we had to tell her no thanks so I started sanding the existing frames down. Then I got another job so we re-employed her, then she masked everything, sanded and filled and it started to rain, for 3 weeks!! She got half done, then had a holiday booked so it was left for another 2 weeks. The front was the last part to get done so Google must have gotten so far and then come back a few months later??

 

[Bon]

So,

After some discussions with the wife and having a play about with the furniture layout, it would seem that the preferred plan now is to construct the porch, but have it entering the lounge at an angle of 90 degrees to the front door (as opposed to the Dining Room as originally intended).

We would then get the arch-way blocked up and a single doorway put in the dividing wall at the kitchen end of the wall.

I'm pretty sure that I don't need planning permission for the works, but after quick read around on here, am I right in thinking my LABC need to be informed, as we will be erecting new internal walls and modifying a load-bearing wall? Is there a self-certification scheme for builders (as there is for Gas Engineers with Gas Safe)? If so does anyone know what it's called?

 

[OwainDIYer]

You can probably retrieve enough bricks from knocking out a new doorway at the side to at least build up the old doorway to cill level and fit another window above. That might solve the problem of lintels and reveal.

Rearranging the internal layout will be subject to Building Regs and the main consideration will be means of escape. You may need to retain the arch between lounge and dining room, or install interlinked smoke detectors.