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.

Hi renovationsnovice, Looks like a large home proposal, the ground floor plan is a little hard to read as there seems to be a number of edit attempts. Reading your initial Brief, to the extent that you have posted it appears that you might benefit from revisiting the brief, and perhaps coming to some compromise on some of the preferred areas. There may be a few items that you might consider on the drawings posted; The Upstairs areas seem not to relate to the downstairs area in terms of bearing, this could reduce some costs by having top walls bearing over bottom walls. The new width of the family room you propose at 8.5 m - for domestic construction this is a significant requiring decent size steel beams and steel columns - if it could be avoided it might result in some worth wile saving in both money and complexities. In all two story's home I always advise my clients to have an office/bedroom/guest room downstairs as it often serves for emergencies when someone breaks a leg or an elderly relative visits. (unless you can prove that such life complexities will not visit you). Its great that you have provided an airlock between the garage and the main passage, if you could locate the stair in this area you could regain some of the space lost by the airlock. There are other areas that my require editing, however it appears that you may have to settle some of the larger areas before you can move on to the next edit. I would be happy to comment/work on this project. Regards Michael Manias - mm407p@gmail.com Manias Associates - Building Designers

Our house is full of cavity sliders. Twice they were all (but one) replaced due to swelling/warping and rubbing against framework when opening and closing. Some made terrible noise whenever we opened or closed them. Hubby had a hunch they were poorly manufactured overseas and discovered that was the case. Builder sourced a local manufacturer and the whole lot, bar one, was replaced and we haven't had any further issues. The one door couldn't be replaced due to it's location - a wall would have had to be pulled down, just as co-design has described. This experience makes me think it may be a case of ensuring you purchase well manufactured doors for your climate and particular environment, and take into careful consideration the particular location they will be installed.

I would prefer to have the pantry and fridge close to each other so that you’re not trekking from one to the other when taking food out to prepare. Then have all of them near the prep area and sink. Bins/compost bin close to sink for disposing if food scraps when making food and scraping plates after eating. Keep ovens and cooktop close to each other. And you need adequate space beside the sink for stacking dirty dishes and draining dry ones (even with a dishwasher) and space beside the cooktop. Minimum of 30cm bit more is preferable. Good luck. Exciting time.