Major Projects For When We Move House

I’m still getting way ahead of myself thinking about what I want in a house when we haven’t even moved out of the flat never mind started properly looking but I like to dream and plan, especially when we need to save money for some of our plans.

There is so much that we want to do in our future home and while we’d love to do everything at the start I don’t think money is going to stretch that far so we may need to work out the major work which needs doing before we move in and what work won’t be too difficult to do after we’ve properly moved in. I’m doing a lot of saving and I know next year we’re going to be strict on our savings which is good as it will allow us to hopefully do as much as we can.

We’re in a very fortunate situation where between Luke and his dad they are pretty great at doing a lot of the work themselves so we should save labour costs but it’s going to mean some long days and hard work. Plus there are some work such as staircase renovation that they wouldn’t be able to do themselves. We’d need to get a company such as First steps designs staircase remodeling to support with any renovations.

Here are some of the bigger pieces of work that we want to do.

Install solar power

Solar power is something we’d love to do right at the start as the longer we can avoid paying for electricity costs the better, and it will start paying for itself from the get-go. Something we need to look into as soon as we know what property we’re going for is to look into the costs around it with the size of the roof. I know there are some grants out there which may help which I need to look into to avoid it becoming too pricey. We’d love to do this at the start as if we have solar it will affect what underfloor heating we go for.

Get underfloor heating

Following on from the above point we’d love underfloor heating as neither of us like the look of radiators and it free’s up the room around the house where radiators would otherwise sit. I love the idea of stepping out of bed onto a nice warm floor in the winter and getting out of the bath and standing on toasty tiles so I don’t freeze. We’ll need to look at central heating systems to ensure it all works well together but this is a definite for before we move in as we don’t want to have to rip up all the floors at a later date.

Sort out the floor plan

We have a good idea in our mind of how we want the downstairs area to be as we want a large open plan kitchen and dining area to allow for us to have an island in the kitchen. From looking at a lot of properties we know that this might not be the case with what we buy so there might be some floor plan changes (house permitting) where we may need to change where walls are or knock them out completely. This may also be the case if we have enough bedrooms and we have a walk-in closet room, but this is less likely.

Sorting out the location of any staircases will be a big thing as well to ensure that the view when you first enter the house looks right. I like the idea of having some slight space at the back of the house so a conservatory is on the cards as a maybe but this wouldn’t be something we’d look to do the first time around. The other big thing which could be a consideration is getting a loft conversion as over time it will add more space to our house, but also it will add value to our house.

Get pocket doors

We want to make sure we maximise the space we have in rooms like the bathrooms and the kitchen and pocket doors seem to be the answer. We’re both fans of them and according to Luke, they’re not too tricky to put in so we think that we’ll want to get rid of some of the traditional doors and have these so there won’t be any awkward spaces behind doors to try and utilise.

Sort out the garden

While a garden isn’t top of our cards it may be something that we want to tackle at the start with the help of a gardener especially if we don’t have a lot of space at the side of the house to move things from the front of the house to the back. We don’t want anything major just some basic grass and a decking area but it would be nice to have somewhere that we spend time in outdoors. Although somewhere to relax like in a hammock with stand would be great for the summer ahead.