Heart of the home

Faced with three living spaces and a tiny kitchen, Jo and Chris have devised a clever, broken-plan layout where the kitchen takes centre stage

- KAREN WILSON

Having cut their teeth renovating their first home, Jo and Chris were itching to step up the property ladder with a new project. The pair had already transformed a soulless ‘upside down’ townhouse in Prestwich, Manchester, on a tight budget of £10,000. Having significantly increased the value, they were eager to find another fixer-upper in the area with a garden for dogs Lola and Olive.

‘We viewed about 10 properties in total,’ says Jo. ‘Having made a couple of offers that fell through on Victorian houses, we eventually found this 1930s semi. It was the ugliest house on the street and felt damp and cold with decades of bodged DIY jobs to fix. However, it was a good size and had one of the biggest gardens in the area.’

At first, the couple hired an architect to draw up plans for a mostly open-plan ground floor with just the front sitting room separated by double doors. They later had a change of heart, however. ‘I thought why make it one large room when we can have a broken-plan layout instead?’ says Jo. ‘We would’ve ended up with something similar to our last place, and we didn’t want one large space to dry our clothes, cook, eat and relax in.’

The key to making it work was relocating the kitchen from the side to the middle of the house, and converting the old galley kitchen into a utility room and cloakroom/WC. A rounded arch was squared off between the front sitting room and new kitchen, while sliding doors into the rear garden room were removed to open things up.

‘We effectively had three sitting rooms in a row, which we didn’t need,’ says Jo. ‘Our plumber said it was feasible with a macerator pump for the drainage and we built the new kitchen first, so we could use the old one in the meantime.’