Does this floor plan make sense? What would you change?

Happy Sunday Property Gurus. After a bit of advice on our house.


Key back story:

- 2br 1940s brick veneer in Melbourne
- Heritage overlay
- Smallish block (7m x 40m = 280m2)
- Back rollerdoor / car port opens up onto a park and river behind
- Have spoken to architect about 2 storey extension, but the time and cost for planning approval, building etc is too great for us
- Looking for options on an internal reno to make the place more liveable for us before we have kids


Current floor plan



Proposed floor plan:
Option 1 (if we're able to move the back wall out a bit and incorporate the sunroom into the building)

Option 2 (if we have to keep the same building envelope)




Details:

Looks like extending outward will be very expensive and will take at least 2+ years from now (including planning approval for heritage and so on), so we're trying to see what we can do with our existing building envelope.

Questions:

- How much do you think we'd be looking at to have the bathroom moved to where the kitchen is, moving a few walls and moving kitchen?
- Can we enclose the sunroom and make it part of the house without planning approval (in a heritage overlay)?
- Is this structurally a big job? Are we better off just saving up until we can extend?
- What would you do differently?


Pictures of actual space below:

Current living room:


Current kitchen




This room is 4x5m and we'd like to turn it into a bathroom / laundry. We're considering putting a wall to the left side of the window, making the space about 3m x 4m.

Back area:
This is where it gets tricky. The current bathroom + laundry + toilet are back here, and at the back it leads out to a sunroom on a concrete slab. The toilet is also on a concrete slab (which is pretty badly cracked). The bathroom is terrible, worst shower in the world, toilet is freezing and having it at the back of the house feels wasteful.

We're wondering if it's possible to turn the rip out the bathroom and laundry, put a kitchen there + turn sunroom into part fo the house.













Is that possible? Or are we essentially talking about an extension which would have to go through planning approval? Does this seem like a good idea? We're looking for something sensible that won't break the bank (Preferably <$100k as I doubt we'd be able to get a construction loan for this).

 

The simplest may be to just swap the bathroom into the utility space and open up the room more to the toilet. Potentially you could move the hallway into the old bathroom area and create a laundry or pantry space with the remainder while also increasing the size of the new bathroom. An added benefit In the kitchen you may find the room more usable if the doorway to the hallway is moved.

 

@Westminster is a whiz at floorplans

As the sunroom apears to be under the roofline I'd try to incorporate it (but you will probably find the ceiling heights are different....)

 

@wylie - Understand the value in waiting to extend, the problem for us atm is that the kitchen and bathroom are pretty ****, and we'd rather spend ~$50k (potentially more) to upgrade bit fo the house for quality of life than wait a couple of years.

But the intention would be to build something that we can live with for a couple of years, but also allows us to extend the back as well as close up the current living room and turn it into a 3rd bedroom. This way we're kinda doing the front of the house + bathroom and if down the line we can build a bigger living room. Is that ill-advised?

@Stoffo - Yep, although it's sorta got its own section of roof (the main roof is a tiled hip roof and the sunroom has a flat-ish corrugated iron roof), but the guttering is all connected. It does indeed have different heights, the house is 3m whereas the sunroom is 2ish.

 

Hey @Mark F, are you suggesting something like this? So keep kitchen where it is (just upgrade the hell out of it!), demolish bathroom, and turn laundry + toilet into bathroom + laundry?







I thought I'd hate this, but laying it out it's actually quite sensible. Would mean we leave the kitchen as-is (and could install a lot of it ourselves), and would just need to remove two walls, have bathroom new bathroom installed and move a doorway.

The question is: Is 3.2m x 2.9m big enough for a bathroom + laundry? I suppose we'd have to sacrifice a bath...

 

Shame you cant demo it and rebuild but then the land is a issue anyway You have posted this prev with other images and the land is exceptionally small and poorly maintained with bad fencing and concrete and neighbouring (common) walls looking a poor state and the property width hampers changes too. Even timber work shows it age and state of wear and repainting alone doesnt help. To be honest if you had kids in that house you will immediately note its size and layout make it unsuitable for a family so its value potential may be very limited. I would imagine plumbing, electrical etc and even roof (flooring and stumps ?) are possibly at end of life so appraisal of its longevity may be wise. It has appearance of a former dept of housing house or ex 1956 olympics village housing. Both built for a low price.

Discuss with agent as spending $50K may do little for value or may do a lot. If it does little it may be worth selling and moving on.

 

Good to know, thanks for the honest opinion. The front of the house is in much nicer condition, whereas the kitchen + bathroom + sunroom seem to be a cheaper 1970s addition.

As per the other thread I made with other photos, you're right about one of our fences, which is in bad nick and is being replaced with a brick fence. Neighbour is extending at the moment so it's being coordinated.

In terms of space, the 2br house is more than big enough for the two of us, even WFH. Before this we were living in a tiny apartment in North Melbourne, so the space seems fine. If we have max 2 kids we could see ourselves living here for 5-7 years without needing much more room. There's also a park and a big playground literally out the back door as well.

Agree on the value proposition though. 280m2 isn't ideal, but we're just trying to figure out how to best make use of it and make it work for us rather than selling, paying $50k in stamp duty again + starting over elsewhere.