Make it Simple But Significant...Design and Planning.

The wait was over, our house design was ready to view and discuss.

Which was very exciting. We were still in the midst of covid, but allowed to travel and with invitation go to the office providing we were wearing the all important face mask. We all remember that.

If I remember rightly we had 3 designs that Isabel had prepared. We had never seen an architect design/plan for real, which was interesting, yet confusing. There were alot of different coloured lines depicting different walls, Electrics, Lights and measurements.

Before we discussed them to find what we liked and wanted, Isabel did say to us, basically we had to be strong regarding budget, in so many cases people can get carried away because they like an idea or design and keep adding it in, so we had to be strong, its not like we have a money tree growing in our garden. I expect you have seen the programme Grand Designs or similar where people get carried away and I can see now how easy that is to happen, you naturally like something and want it, so we have to be strong, the only things we would have extra would be a need for the house not a want.

We had our budget and a contingency as we were aware there would be findings along the way.

The designs were great, and did exactly what we wanted, which was to reduce the amount of rooms, and to make the house flow from being 2 houses to one.

Essentially the footprint has stayed the same, but I figure that our Puzzle house and our budget for this was not an architects dream. and we do know it was certainly a challenge for her If we did have that money tree the design would have been different in terms of moving and changing where some of our more usable rooms are such as the utility room.

The design is focused on how each room is positioned as to where the sun moves, how much light we will have and how long for.

As we were keeping the floor plan as it was this was about making the best of where each room was.

While looking at the designs we liked different elements for each. so we combined parts from 2 of the designs. I make it sound quite easy to combine but Isabel had to ensure that these changes would support everything we were trying to achieve, would fit with the design, would fit with in our budget and be sustainable. We were hoping to apply for grants along the way which we would be eligible for providing we meet certain criteria.

The changes were to make the upstairs 2 bedrooms, reducing the rooms from 3 . One would be the master with ensuite and the other a spare bedroom with small ensuite for visitors.

The living room kitchen and dining room will be open plan, one big social space, this means knocking the existing living room wall down to the hallway and moving the staircase into the new hallway. To make use of existing rooms we would have a games room, an office and also another spare bedroom which reduces the main part of the house to 3 bedrooms which makes foxglove lodge a more useable property. The cottage will become a self contained one bedroom annexe/flat.

We were also quite overwhelmed with this part of the process. It is an emotive thing seeing how your house could look, but also the compromises you make to achieve this, due to cost implications. its exciting but also quite sad.

We took the plans home, to go through them in our own time and think about the changes we discussed and what would work for us.

The Future

Once we had decided our design, we then received a digital mock up of the design and a video.

These are some of the pictures, from that.

The Past

I have also added the old agents photo to this just for comparison of the outside, and just how different it looks, you can see why we were thrilled.

Interiors

Interiors

The next step was submitting the design to planning planning. So for the next 3 months we had everything crossed, for their agreement and no objections.

We could see that Foxglove Lodge was about to transform and gain a whole new identity.

Have no fear of Perfection--You will never reach it - Salvador Dali