Hi all,

We are at a loss with what to do with our floor plan. I am hoping someone with a bit more creativity than myself might be able to think of a solution.

We have a fair bit of living space to work with at our house, but a house layout that doesn't utilise it very well. The main objective of the renovations will be to improve the kitchen, but if we can change the house layout to better use the floor space and make it more functional, that would be great. Bonus points if we can fit a 4th bedroom in a logical location, but this isn't 100% essential if this is too much of a squeeze. Most of the places we can think to put one in (e.g the existing lounge or rumpus room) seem out of place when we draw it up.

To help your visualisation, we currently do all of our living/lounging in the rumpus room and almost nothing in the other living spaces. Right now they are mostly functioning and storage / void space. The "family" room on the house plan is essentially a walkway between the entry at the front door and the rumpus room. This is a real shame because this family room walk-way is fairly big (approx 4m x 4m), but with the current setup, it is hard to put anything there without blocking the doorway to the rumpus room. Perhaps re-orientating the other spaces might allow us to use that area more effectively?

We are planning on doing as much DIY as possible. While we want to keep costs down, there is no firm budget; rather the budget will dictate our timeline for completion. If we do spend a reasonable amount, then we would also want it to improve the overall value of the house by a reasonable amount, or else we will be unlikely to recoup what we spend on it when it comes time to sell it in the future.

The most likely / cheapest scenario I can see is removing the walls around the kitchen/dining/family spaces to make it open plan and putting the kitchen in the back left corner of that space. Not much design work will be needed if this is all we can achieve. Another option that would be amazing, but unsure of the cost and practicality behind it, would be moving the kitchen and dining to the rumpus room so that it can flow on to an outdoor dining space outside, and having the entire front space of the house as living, lounge, study etc with the kitchen removed. This space might be awkwardly large for that alone though...

I have included two photos - the first is the house plans with measurements, the second includes the rumpus room extension (roughly 40m2).

The house is built in the late 80's, asbestos free, on a concrete slab, truss roof, although the rumpus room is an extension therefore the walls leading onto it would be load-bearing.

Any ideas are welcome!