Hi all. Apologies for long post!
My husband and I bought a house last year which we love - it's the middle of three Victorian houses that used to be two-up two-downs before they had extensions. Downstairs it has a really big open plan living room/dining room, an extension with a 15 x 9 foot kitchen in it, a little lobby with a door to the garden (there's also a door to the garden from the living room), and a small (4 x 6) downstairs loo/utility room.
The first floor used to have just two double bedrooms in it - front and back. But the back bedroom (which would be about 13 x 12) has been converted into a large bathroom and a landing area with the boiler in it and bookshelves. There's now also a fully-kitted out loft-conversion with proper staircase etc, and that room (which is our bedroom) is 17' x 12'. The front bedroom, also 13 x 12, is the same as it has always been, I guess. So we have two bedrooms and an upstairs bathroom + landing.
My husband has been offered his absolute dream job much closer to London, where I already work (I commute there - 1.5 hour commute each way and we have a 20-month-old DD and another baby on the way). There's no way he can pass this up as the opportunity just won't come around again. We can't rent the house (we'd lose £400 a month on the mortgage alone) and have 0% equity. When we were planning on staying, we always wanted to convert the house to 3 bedrooms, but had complicated renovation plans which would have been expensive and time-consuming.
So we have a quicker plan now for adding equity: simply to turn the downstairs loo/utility AND the little lobby area into a bathroom which would come directly off the kitchen (apparently it used to be this way - this would make the bathroom 8x6). And take out the upstairs bathroom, knock down the partition wall between it and the landing area, and thereby reinstate the lost bedroom. This would mean we had 3 double bedrooms and a downstairs bathroom off the kitchen. This is by far the cheapest option and we think it would add at least £20k to the value of the house, meaning we could sell, cover moving costs, and have a small sum left over to bank and begin saving for a new deposit. (We'll go into rented.)
My question is: does this sound like a sensible trade-off? All the rooms will be really good sizes, and I know downstairs bathrooms are pretty common in Victorian terraces of this layout, but downstairs bathrooms off the kitchen - how much of a drawback would that be to you if you loved everything else about a house? It's possible we could leave a toilet/sink ensuite in the back bedroom - would that make a difference?
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Downstairs bathroom off kitchen
91 replies
siluria · 11/03/2013 11:04
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