How to Change Your Home’s Layout for Maximum Light and Happiness - Part One
A step by step guide to changing the layout of your home & reimagining the way you live. Our ground level floor plans, the changes we’re making & why.
We live in not so sunny England, it rains a lot, in case you didn’t know, so light and harnessing it to maximum effect in a home is essential. But, so often homes are designed without any thought to the health and wellbeing of its occupants.
How can you change your home to increase its link to the outside world and, in turn, reap the benefits in your daily family life? How can you get the much needed en suite without extending? How can you reimagine your internal walls to make the whole space flow better? Using my near 30 years experience in home renovation, I’ll be explaining all in this two part series today and on Thursday. You don’t want to miss this.
Creating more light is easier than you think. Other than the obvious choice of installing more glass and increasing window aperture, very often the answer lies in the correct flow of a building, opening up spaces and the views beyond. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve viewed a property and been aggravated by the laziness and lack of foresight in whoever designed the layout, without a single thought to how it connects with its surroundings.
Why is there a wall where a window or door should be? That’s south, why have they blocked the view? Why have they created such a long dark hallway when the initial view of the wider internal space and the garden beyond could have been seen within the first four steps on entry? If only they had taken the time to think about it logically and create an opening.
Look at the before and after photo above of one of our previous homes. It’s completely obvious there should never have been a wall where the view of the garden is. By literally thinking outside the box, the space is flooded with light. The view reels you in and says: “come out and play!”
The barn we live in now is another prime example. Low window thresholds where you need to be five foot nothing to look out without crouching, roof windows in bedrooms so low down only Missy the dog can see the garden, north-facing spaces that feel more like a cave, and quite frankly, dark narrow pointless hallways that are the epitome of gloom.
What’s even more annoying is our barn faces south, and when you eventually do get to the main living space it’s flooded with light and happiness. The flow is all wrong. Someone should have taken more time to plan when the barn was converted in the 1970s.
So let’s get down to the details. In this two-part series, today and next Thursday, I’m going to be giving you my step by step instructions to reimagine your home and its internal and external layout.
I’ll be showing you our existing ground floor plans as an example, and what we are going to do to make them a hundred times better. I’ll be explaining how the new double height dormers and roof lights will change the barn for the good, and give you lots of other interior inspiration from other homes I love to illustrate my points and help you out with your ideas.
The rest of this post with my step by step guide for reimagining your home and the second part on Thursday with all the floor plans is for the brilliant paid members who make my countless days writing here possible, and who will, essentially, be helping me pay for this build. If you would like to contribute, get all the juicy info and join our fabulous tribe then click on the button below within this email.