Hi everyone

We’re super keen on buying this place and renovating (worst house in great street), but completely flummoxed by what we would do with the weird floorplan. The house is North to rear but floorplan doesn’t tap into any of that potential.

The house

• house is double brick and has been gradually extended on at the back. The back is brick veneer
• The upstairs internal walls are gyprock so presumably non-load bearing and easy to relocate, but appreciate we’ll need engineers to assess

What we’re hoping to achieve with the renovations

• we are a young family with 2 kids under 4 and not planning on anymore children.
• we’d need at least 4 bedrooms and open living, dining and kitchen area at the rear of the house to capitalise on the northern light
• we want to knock down the external laundry and re-arrange the floorplan to contain an internal laundry
• ideally have a bathroom upstairs
• we’ve got a budget of approximately $300k to play around with for renovations. Definitely not enough for substantial floorplan changes, but maybe if we get creative with floorplan solutions it’ll get us to where we need
• our most appealing idea so far is:

1. knock out the internal wall between bedroom 2 and family room, extend the family room as close as we can to the Garage and make that entire back area an open living, dining, kitchen.
2. make the existing dining room into a bedroom
3. make the existing kitchen into a laundry
4. subject to engineering, knock out internal walls in the existing “meals” room. I don’t think they’re load bearing but its an old house so who knows
5. I’ve very roughly sketched out our idea for the ground floor. Red lines are the parts to knock out, green lines are the parts to add in.
6. do something with the upstairs - perhaps make one of the upstairs bedrooms into a bathroom & just have 2 bedrooms upstairs. The upstairs bedrooms are pretty small though, so if there's some nifty ideas to increase their size by borrowing from the prospective bathroom that would be cool too. Alternatively we could make the upstairs into one giant retreat with master bedroom, walk in robe & bathroom and wall off the downstairs study to make it a smaller 4th bedroom?

What does everyone think? What are your floorplan challenge ideas? Is any of this even vaguely achievable with the rough budget we have in mind?

Appreciate it's all rough ideas/figures and subject to council approval and engineering.