Interesting house. You appear to have good western shade with trees in the front garden - do you plan to keep that? And your kitchen should get decent light/warmth in winter, because it faces north. Can you capitalise on that with bigger windows on that side, without compromising privacy for you and your neighbour? The back area won't get much sun in winter but will be a lovely retreat from the afternoon heat in summer. Can you open up access to the lounge room and kitchen to enjoy that more? Ditching the separate laundry and building it into the kitchen area would improve outlook and year round air flow. It would also give you more room in the kitchen/dining area to include a study nook. I realise you might have difficulty with a high number of windows and doors in the lounge, but that high window on the back wall of the lounge room seems to rob you of a lot of good things and offer very little. Removing the wall between the lounge and kitchen and putting in a U shaped kitchen would offer an interesting, open space. Harder to heat in winter (because you can't close off separate rooms) but more able to take advantage of the cooler air from the rear in summer and the northern sun and heat in winter. The study seems the obvious space for a main bedroom with a small ensuite and WIR, but it's not great to have it coming off the dining room. Without an addition I don't know what else you could do. I suggest you reduce your front entries to one very inviting one - at present you have one into the kitchen and one into the lounge. Unless you want to do something like put in bifolds or stacking doors to allow you to open up the house to the courtyard, I'd stick with one lovely (timber or a bright colour) door into the lounge and replace other doors with big windows (or glass doors that obviously aren't your front door). If you open up the kitchen and lounge by removing that joining wall, it will particularly need you to have one entry focus. Also allows you to have a lovely pathway through the courtyard to the door. Given the age of the house it is unlikely to have decent insulation - and hard to install in a flat roofed house. Might be worth replacing ceilings and inserting insulation as you do. Windows will almost certainly be only 3mm glass - consider putting in thicker glass in new windows as this can really improve temperature control (or very good floor to ceiling curtains). Good luck with this. Great project.

Our house is similar, but we are empty nesters and down sized about 4 years ago, our needs would be a bit different to a growing family, we are currently in the throes of having two smaller rooms made into one area to further open up a previous renovation to give us a bigger open space..we also have an ensuite and a combined laundry / second laundry space. The good thing is that being a brick veneer house the reconfiguring is relatively easy with modern technology and big beams. As above try and have a big open space, we have been out of our home for a month now and still a way to go, add living away from home to your budget or stay with family. I will try and post the plan but here are a couple of journey pics ..the last photo was before trying to show how the two rooms decided the space making the living room very small and a bit dark...the aim of this project is to have space for a bigger gathering than about 4 people before overcrowded. Light is really important, nice big windows essential, the darkness of the living I thought I could live with, but it did get me down, I a, looking forward to having a much lighter space

As previously mentioned, not traditional baths can be a nightmare with kids, so if kids are on your agenda, have a good think. Also, if you are not going to stay in the house for a LONG time, consider resale. Parents look for traditional baths for young children and non-traditional bathrooms look good, but can be a real turnoff. If this is your forever, no-kid home, go for it. If not, perhaps reconsider. I am also wondering why you are looking to spend so much on a bathroom that you will not be using (apart from the bath)? Just be careful you haven't overspent/overcapitalised on a portion of the house that really only needs to be functional and modern. People might love the bathrooms on the block, or whatever, but they buy houses in their price-range with functional amenities. Just some food for thought. Good luck with the build.

Just to confirm I have taken the great ideas presented here as advice only and have no intention to do some dodgy diy reno's. With the exception of a couple of quirky exposed timbers as you can see in my pictures there are no other exposed beams. As you can also see from the pictures there is a large roof space on the right (east) side of the house but the ceilings themselves are flat with a slight dip on the north wall. Based on my own personal experiences I would have to agree with Two's Company that there is a tendency towards rendered brick in WA (although there are still many exposed brick houses in my suburb) while double enclosed double garages are also highly desirable. I would also agree that toilets within the main bathroom and non traditional laundries may be considered unusual by many (but not all). Ensuites with toilets however are still very common. Also due to the nature of our work we would prefer the laundry separated from food/kitchen area. For a 4x2 house it is only around 155m2 excluding carport/alfresco which makes the rooms feel quite cramped, hence the desire to open up the family room. However, as Two's Company suggests we will need to first get a builder/eng in to check load bearing walls etc as this will undoubtedly affect what we can achieve within our budget. Having said that I still excited by many of your ideas and with luck hopefully can work some of them into the budget. Cheers all :)