My husband and I (early 30's, no kids but would like to have 2 in the next 5 years or so) are looking to renovate our double brick home, which currently has an enclosed old-style floor plan, tiny ancient kitchen and no internal laundry. Ideally, we'd like to open the space up, renovate the kitchen to be more open plan and have the kitchen opening out onto the backyard as an outdoor entertaining area.
We don't have any building/renovation experience and have tossed around the idea in the floor plan below as phase 1:
- knocking down the yellow highlighted walls (most likely load bearing, we're getting a structural engineer to confirm)
- building a wall in the green highlighted area where the stove, oven, dishwasher etc will be relocated. The current kitchen sink area will be converted to glass doors that open out into the backyard
- converting Bed 3 into an internal laundry
For phase 2, the room that's called "Family" is the only part of the house that's made out of fibro (asbestos yay!) and freezing in winter so we don't spend much time in there and don't want to keep it. Later on, we'd likely demolish the fibro walls of the "Family" room and use that area to extend into another 2 bedrooms and a bathroom. This will be probably 5 years or more away
Looking for feedback and ideas for other ways we may be able to get to where we want (I know knocking down load bearing walls will be likely very exxy). Thanks very much!