When we bought our first home five years ago, having children wasn’t top of our agenda. Nevertheless, we made sure to look for a home that would grow with us as we started to grow our family. You see, we’ve always been certain that we want to have children.
Our village location is perfect. There’s a local primary school with a good reputation. Loads of kids activities going on in the village, too. We have a nature reserve behind us with more paths than we’ve managed to discover in the years that we’ve lived here. Yes – even with our daily walks during the lockdowns! We’ve dreamt of our future children learning to ride their bikes, us following behind with a watchful eye.
Creating More Space
When we made the decision to start trying to conceive, we talked about how we would change our home to create more space. On the surface, we have the perfect family home. There are three double bedrooms and an ample garden space. But really, we’re lacking living space downstairs.
Our living room is…snug. Perfect for a cosy evening in front of the fire. But it’s definitely lacking in floor space. Then there’s our dining kitchen. A good size to house our dining table and the kitchen area is fit for purpose. Despite this, I’m convinced we’ll soon see its pitfalls as we grow to three. With no space for a tumble drier and barely enough freezer space for the two of us, I’m sure we’ll struggle.
The answer’s simple…we’ll need more space.
Adding a rear extension
The plan we have is to add a 3 metre extension to the ground floor. This will double the size of our current kitchen/diner! We plan to turn this into a family room. We’ll keep the kitchen/diner (albeit with a slightly different layout) and add a seating area and space to play when we do eventually manage to grow our family.
We’ll knock down the existing external wall to create the space so we’ll lose our patio door and kitchen window. To keep the costs down, once the extension itself is built, Si will complete a lot of the work himself with some help from his brother and other friends who work in the trades. We’ll source cheap windows and patio doors to upgrade those that we’re taking out. Ideally, we’d like to let more light in by installing a larger window than we currently have.
Landscaping
Once we get the inside sorted out, we’ll need to focus on the garden again. We’ll lose some space by extending. Our existing patio will need to move but we’ll try to re-use the same stone to cut costs.
I’m particularly looking forward to getting our garden sorted out, too. Our lawn has been very uneven since we moved in. Although we’ve done bits and pieces, we’ve not done as much as we could have in the garden. We didn’t want to get it all sorted to then have to do it again post-extension.
As we tentatively try to grow our family via our current IVF treatment, we are looking forward to also bringing to life these plans. They’ve been swimming around in our heads for even longer than we’ve been trying to conceive!