Just reading your ideas on your bars interior, love the idea of the rustic preloved theme, makes you feel like a visitor at a friends place rather than a customer. I thought an interesting way to display memorabilia which is inexpensive and also looks the part is to use fruit boxes or crates and fix them together in different positions and fix to the wall, for example one vertical screwed to a horizontal etc so they create bookcases, niches on the walls, they also look amazing when lit up by spotlits which will cast nice lighting across them and provide a great shadowed ambience. Moody and eye-catching Ml design

for a kids room make over, may I suggest my painting "Once in a Blue Donkey" as an add of colour and fantasy - something to stir the imagination ... available at Bluethumb

Hi Wendan, we recently got double glazing installed to replace large sliding doors and windows. In some cases some noise is now more noticeable. I queried the installer and he said it happens a bit. The glass changes the type of noise that enters the house due to frequency. For example, I almost never hear our neighbours loud TV any more, but sometimes notice low pitch traffic noise from further away (less ambient noise to dull the hum). There is apparently specific double glazing for noise reduction, which wasn't something we considered when we were retrofitting, but possibly would've been good to know (two points in the house seem to be more affected by this, rather than the whole place). The other thing I'll mention is the frames. After lots of research we decided to get sliding units, essentially replacing like for like style. We had trouble trying to work out why casement style provided better thermal properties, other than being told the seal is better. The main difference now appears to be in the design/manufacture. Casements come as a complete unit, no gaps in the frame. Sliders come in two pieces with windows inserted into the frame in situ. This results in small air gaps between the frame and window due to the need for wiggle room. Annoying that we didn't find this out until after the event, seems like a bit of a flaw. Overall though, the glazing seems better than the almost 30yo bog standard stuff we previously had. Looking forward to summer with low-e glass and hopefully less heat entering the house.

Thanks Kate. In the first photo at top of this thread is our existing house, with the load bearing walls being the solid lines on outside. We now have a tweaked plan version 3 below- but still not convinced yet... We were keen to make bedroom 2 and 3 a bit bigger as the kids will use their room more than we will lol! What we are looking to do would be to add on one end (the lounge and master) and widen Bed 2 a bit as it is quite narrow. We would like to improve the kitchen and dining and entrance but getting a bit stuck here. We are trying use the space we have got without changing too much to save in cost but this area is important to us and would be used probably more than the lounge, which is quite big in comparison. The alfresco would be a bonus. It is more so that we want to include a back door leading outside as otherwise people would need to go back out the front entry or use the laundry door which is pokey and small. If we could revamp the kitchen and dining in a creative way, so the dining doesn't look so small compared to the lounge that would be good. The idea would be to see how big/far we can go, then ask a builder to quote and if too expensive, scale it right back...We have ruled out going up as we thought this too expensive?