As a UK homeowner, your goal is to always make your home outstanding and increase its overall resale value. One of the surest ways to achieve this is by incorporating additional spaces.
Adding more spaces in your home does not only make it bigger, but it also helps you unlock its potential by ensuring it complements your style and personality.
However, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to wake up one morning and decide to do a home extension. This is an undertaking that demands meticulous planning and design.
Home extension architecture should be designed to conform to your lifestyle. Before you start, ensure you have enough clarity on what you need. Find out the purpose of your project, and ensure the extension addresses unique and personal aspects of your life before anything else.
To ensure that you are not spending unnecessary, below are some ideas you should consider;
Blend the Old with the New
In case you live in an old house, developing an extension that will make it beautiful without compromising its traditional feel is not easy.
Coming up with contemporary home extension styles that abide by the original footprint of a traditional building will demand that you understand what the extension will be used for and do careful planning. Whether you are looking at the luxury end of London or need a planning consultant in Northampton, getting a consultant on board at the beginning of the project will save you later down the line when you’re asked to stop work by the counsel for now adhering to guidelines or gaining the correct permissions.
Once you have the planning, you’ll find there are various modern house extensions that can suite your old house, including;
- Garage conversions
- Upper story addition
- Up and under extensions
- Single storey rear and side extensions
Extend the Garden
The best life you can enjoy is found outdoors. Therefore, extending your garden will greatly contribute to the beauty of your home and make outdoor living comfortable.
Extending the garden is twofold. You can actually extend the garden if there is unused space, for example, a big hedge or wall that could provide more space to create a larger garden. The second fold is building in your garden. Building clever mini studios can add an extra room to your home without messing with the integrity of your house.
If this is all more than you bargained for and you just want to make your garden look bigger. Here a few tips you can use to add glamour to your extended space;
- Add furnishings- do thorough research and find furnishings that will complement the classiness of your garden extension. Have a budget and invest in durable and strong furniture pieces that reflect your style and personality.
- Include lighting- once you complete building a home garden, don’t forget to light it up. This will create stunning beauty at night and make it possible for you and your loved ones to enjoy every evening in the back patio or porch.
- Add accessories– to finish your garden extension project in style, use the right accessories to cover the details. You can add as many accessories as you like but ensure they don’t compromise the splendour you have worked hard to create.
Keep it Period
If you want to extend your home but you don’t want to ruin the look, why don’t you keep it period?
Period homes have characteristics that cannot be found in modern homes and are usually the reason people bought the house in the first place. They are usually protected by the counsel and thus it’s better to design on extension with the original features in mind. To give your new extension a traditional feel, including some features that are only found in period homes such as huge fireplaces, bay windows, wooden beams, and solid wood floors. Such features will not only add charm to your property, but they will also help you create a unique living space.
With certain areas cities being redeveloped in a contemporary way it may be tempting to go against the grain. Birmingham is a great example. The city has an incredibly mixed architectural range, with many parts of the city indistinguishable as even being from Birmingham. However, there are areas with incredibly characterful houses, and it may be wise, in order to get planning permission, if for no other reason, to keep the extension period and in keeping with the architecture of the surrounding area. In case you are not an enthusiastic DIYer or whether or not, you love treating every project with the professionalism it deserves, you must endeavour to work with an architect in Birmingham who will help you plan and construct an element that will elevate your lifestyle and boost your property value, they will know the area and be able to advise you on the best solution to get your extension granted.
Extend the Kitchen
Your kitchen is doubtlessly one of the most important elements in your home. It is the place where you literally make your daily bread, not to mention that it is one of the spaces that receive most traffic within your home. Having a small kitchen can actually be stressful especially during holiday periods such as Christmas.
In case you want to see your house at some point, one of the selling points will be the size of your kitchen. Therefore, when planning for a home extension, don’t forget to design a statement kitchen.
An open-space kitchen is now the epicentre of contemporary living. Therefore, whether you are developing a new property or remodelling a period home, this is a fact that you need to keep in mind.
When you create a large open-space kitchen, you will create ample room for preparing meals, dining with your loved ones, and lounging.
When creating your kitchen extension, don’t shy away from using colour. Be brave with the colour you believe will reflect your personality. Experiment with a small portion of the wall, and if you fall in love with it, then go for it!
Don’t forget to make storage beautiful and accessible. Develop an open shelving system, and you will have cookery books, utensils, cereals, and anything else that you regularly use at hand whenever you need it.
Instead of having storage cabinets dotted all around your kitchen, have them in a specific area. This will keep everything you need close to you and also help in the coordination of your colour schemes.
In case you have been struggling for space, then creating a new kitchen extension could be your ultimate answer.
Clever use of Glass
A glass extension in your home is a stunning and impactful addition to any modern or traditional home. Glass extensions not only create more room in your house, but they also flood the existing space with natural light.
There are different ways you can use glass to create a lasting aspect in your home. If you would like to get some inspiration then you could check out some blogs, like the one run by Projects 4 Roofing (https://www.projects4roofing.co.uk/), to learn more about extensions and what they can bring to your home. For example, you can merge the indoors and outdoors utilizing an open-aspect glass extension. Doing this will break the barrier between your home’s interior and exterior, hence creating a space that could convert your home into one of the most adored masterpieces in the neighbourhood.
Also, you can use a slim frame of glass extension to develop a seamless connection between your garden and the indoors. To enhance the elegance, you can position a bright light inside the space and solve the lighting problem when night falls.
A floor-to-ceiling glass extension can also come in handy to create an outstanding feel. You can give this extension a view by removing everything that blocks the sightlines, thus giving a spectacular view of the outdoors. The feeling of openness you will get from this will not only boost the liveability of your abode, but it will also boost its value with insane margins.
You can create a myriad of extensions using glass as long as you are willing to get creative and invest significant amounts of time and energy to get it right.