Once the air tightness strategy was established, we could work towards finalising the design ready to submit for planning approval. You can really see how Russel’s architectural expertise has transformed my initial thoughts (there’s a plan I sketched in Blog Post No. 2: Finding an Architect) into a layout that works significantly better. The key moves that Russel made were:
making the layout more efficient, with a single entrance and keeping both bathrooms where the existing plumbing is located;
swapping the kitchen and dining areas to work with the single entrance, so that you enter through the dining area and not the ‘working’ area of the kitchen;
opening up the living / kitchen / dining space to be much more open plan, creating a space that gets both the morning and evening sun;
with the more efficient layout, reducing the size of the gym so that the building footprint goes back to the original rectangle. This saves costs and makes the building more energy efficient by reducing surface area;
with the two bathrooms now next to one another, the utility area can be efficiently combined with the air source heat pump / hot water kit;
simplifying the stepped access from the living room to the garden to create a more elegant solution; and
with the air tightness strategy meaning that all internal walls will be replaced, the layout of the bedrooms could be reconsidered. The master bedroom gets a built-in wardrobe by borrowing some space from the second bedroom, making it more obviously the ‘main’ bedroom.
The external appearance will be transformed through a simple but effective approach. Instead of a single material across all external walls (currently rather grim pebbledash), the base is expressed in blue-grey engineering brick slips and the main walls in light coloured render covering the external insulation. This is especially effective on the rear garden elevation, where the building will have much more attractive proportions.
At this stage, we ran the drawings past two potential builders to get their input on likely construction costs. Both were a little over my initial budget. But not so far off to make me concerned I’d be submitting a planning application for something that couldn’t be achieved.
There were still some refinements that we’d need to think about after planning – the detail of the MVHR layout, radiator locations and thinking more deeply about the bathroom and kitchen layouts. But – with the Russel’s architectural input - the scheme had evolved to something far more refined (and more efficient!) than my initial thoughts.
Comments