Passive solar principles are important when designing a home for comfort, that will be light, & warm in winter. Particularly in a cold climate like Tasmania. So I commend you for taking orientation into account, the living room will be a beautiful sunny spot in winter. So I'd stick with the original plan of locating the dining area to the north, not the kitchen as was suggested in one post. As the dining area is more likely to have a large window to introduce more light & winter heat. I'd also suggest you don't have a north facing verandah. At 1.7m it will shade your northern windows in winter, dramatically reducing any beneficial winter heat gain. Average sized eaves are much more appropriate for a northern aspect. It's unfortunate that downstairs will struggle to access northern light, so gaining some from the staircase is a good idea. I'd zone your living areas from other areas, particularly the staircase, so you can choose to heat your living areas more effectively.

Hi Renai, there are a couple of things about the kitchen that trouble me. To me in some ways it looks like a hybrid of 1990's kitchens and the current direction design is taking. The L-shaped return looks like it has a breakfast bar, but so does the island bench - a duality that does the kitchen no favours. I would ditch the L- return. This achieves a number of things: 1 - It facilitates better traffic flow between the kitchen and dining room; 2- it eliminates the awkward corner cupboard, always a problem that none of the many high tech "solutions" address adequately; 3 - it simplifies the construction of the kitchen, with potential savings; I would move the island bench up the page (possibly even make it longer), providing a free wall for tall storage cabinets, and or alternative fridge location. The door to the walk in pantry would need to move slightly to best achieve this. The corner location where you have the fridge now is not good for one main reason: you will often need to open fridge doors up wider than 90° to pull out drawers and shelves for cleaning, and even at 90° most modern fridge doors require more space than just the fridge recess allows.

Susie, this type of problem is becoming a regular issue/post here. The issue is that the design process is not robustly managing the practical costs appropriately to budget, and also managing client's expectations of what can be achieved for certain budget limits. All projects involve balancing requirements to budget in specific context. There will be structural costs either way. The question is rather, how best to maximise the investment in regards to the functional benefits and overall result. If you want my 2 cents I'm never a fan of squeezing down flow into areas such as dining spaces and creating internal doglegged corners unless it serves a specific function. It's a strange (poor) set-up to have the the only external access via the dining room that you have to walk past the island bench and negotiate living room furniture etc. There's however no furniture in this plan which doesn't help us fully understanding the design or functional rationale behind the proposal. I think it's good to take the opportunity to re-think this. We are finding increasingly that we are being asked to come in and sort issues like this out properly when clearly the design process hasn't been managed properly. Don't mean to be overly critical however the fact is it had been designed properly then you wouldn't be posting your problem on a design dilemma forum. If you're interested in hearing further about how we could professionally assist you in resolving the design solution feel free to contact us directly for further discussion and details. There's not a quick answer to this as it involves understanding details of your requirements, budget and context in order to provide the appropriate advice. The best advice I can provide is you need to be working with a design professional who is experienced with these types & scale of projects and inherently understands the cost consequences of design decisions one way or the other. In your case you require a clever simple solution that balances, connects and maximises both the internal and external functional requirements. I can think of various configuration options that could achieve this general requirement of living/kitchen dining but making much better use of your land on a tight site, retaining/maximising the external space required or even better still give the illusion that it's bigger than it is by exploiting the site length - however this requires a deeper and proper level of design service than just a few comments provided here. I've been involved with trouble shooting this type of situation on numerous occasions and in order to get it right it unfortunately requires us coming in, unpicking it and going backwards to go forwards, however I can confidently say it is always is worth the effort and investment as we ultimately need to be working to maximise the long term end result. Cheers PD :)

Hi @siriuskey, correct, it's a strange set up. The homes were built as show homes, so the 'front door' faces the main road, but has no access to the street via foot/car. The 'back door' (nearer the shared driveway) therefore is accessed as most people would access a front door. No parking on the main road, no. The front door is only used to access the front yard (main road side). Yes, all one slab. No idea of budget - just starting the process. Trying to work out if worth renovating now/in future or just moving when we outgrow the phone. Built 1995.