âAnd then there were moreâ - article for SelfBuild magazine
This was written for SelfBuild magazine in Spring 2015.
Itâs available online on Issu (pages 94-100) - click here.
The custom bunkbed in the image is the work of Sibeal OâSullivan, an architect based in Dublin. The middle image is an extension of mine - the whole extension is just the size of the window seat. Iâm afraid I donât know who the last image is from. The plans are some of my projects.
The Issu text is a bit hard to read, so Iâm scanning the pages and interspersing the text - all very low-tech.
 What happens when the bijou apartment or terrace you bought as a couple now has to house four or more? This is the first in a series of articles looking at how to make small spaces bigger without, in most cases, needing another mortgage.
When your circumstances have changed and your home is under pressure then there are two ways to think about it. Option one is to see your home as just not being suitable and putting your energy into getting out of it as soon as possible. This will incur cost, time and effort and, as many people don't want to move from their chosen area but can't afford a larger property there, emotional upheaval as well. Option two is reorganising the space thereby avoiding most of that, and getting a better home in the process.
 Changing times, changing places
With changed priorities you view your home differently and that's the start of seeing what can be done to satisfy these new demands on the space. Itâs not that you can just go Zen and calmly contemplate your way out of the mess of toys in your one 15 sq.m. living space. I do though have conversations with homeowner parents where it has dawned on them that when they were growing up, all the children in their family shared bedrooms and that nobody was irreparably damaged by the experience. If you live in an old house, take a look at a census and see how many people, especially children, used to live in a space that you're having difficulty in fitting four into. Of course times have changed and the social structure that let that happen has also transformed, but it is a sobering exercise. We also have a lot more stuff now â especially clothes and toys for kids. A good starting point is often a clear out of both, most children have a few favourite toys and the rest are just taking up space.
Working with what youâve got
The most important first step to improving your situation doesn't cost anything; be pragmatic. Thatâs not to say you should throw your lifestyle aspirations out the window, but you have to be prepared to adapt yourself to the house as well as adapting the house to yourself.
 Next is taking time to understand what youâre working with. Every home is different so one solution will not fit all, even if the basic house structure is the same, for example a terrace or bungalow, but what they all have in common is potential. Unlocking solutions usually involves prioritising so thinking about what is most important to you in how you want to make use of your home, is key. At the outset therefore, identify the broad results you want to achieve and then move on to specific physical alterations or additions â not the other way around. The way some houses are laid out might preclude certain solutions, but by looking at what youâve actually got with a creative eye you can often achieve what you want without having to resort to the wrecking ball completely. A very simple way to start this process is to get the floor plan drawn accurately. Just seeing that can often spark insights for homeowners, and there are an ever increasing number of apps and tools to help â itâs not all about graph paper. Above all it must be accurate so invest in a scale rule â this allows you to draw plans in proportion to a particular scale â 1:100 and 1:50 are the handiest ones (thatâs 1cm=1m and 2cm=1m). Finally, tracing paper so that you can sketch out different ideas over the one set of measurements. You can get this in art supply shops.
Of course no discussion of what youâre working with can ignore the bottom line. Take for example a small three bed house; you either have somewhere between âŹ10 - 30K/ÂŁ8 - 24K, a figure where you will need to be careful and strategic and limit the amount of building work. Opening up adjoining rooms, building or upgrading a shed to take storage overspill or to use as a utility are examples of what you can do on this budget. Spending a little on improving both the quality and quantity of storage is another sound approach. The smaller the house the more crucial good storage is â and the bigger bang youâre going to get from your buck. Under the stairs is ideal for big drawers â for schoolbags, shoes etc. Alcoves either side of the fireplace, if you have them, are useful for things you might want to look at occasionally, including the TV of course. On the more design conscious side, but still at this budget level, you might get real results from a micro-extension, a key piece of new space that is cleverly worked out and unlocks the house overall. Best of all is a solution that solves more than one problem.
It also pays to think about how spaces are actually used and how different things happen at different times. If you open up that front room to the rest, do you need to be able to close it again when you want a space to get away from each other or from the kids? Making limited space work is about much more than just creating as big a single space as you can; paradoxically, that can often give a sense of there being less. Giving yourself options in how you want to use your living space on any particular day and for a range of activities is usually a better way to go.
 In the situation we are considering here - smallish house, growing family â you may be in the second category of people who are able to spend between âŹ30-80K/ÂŁ24-65K. At this level you can afford to add some space, but it is crucial that the new space is made to integrate with the original house. Sometimes this might mean a big structural opening to connect the old and new, and the cost of this can often pay for itself by you not having to build on so much. In any case, however they connect, it's essential to think about the overall layout afterwards and not just focus on the new extension. With a relatively limited budget like this it may mean building less in order to build better. Although it may seem far-fetched, it is perfectly possible to build new space that ends up making the current space difficult or unpleasant to use.
What both of these scenarios have in common is a design led approach. It is the essential ingredient in transforming space, within budget, to solve problems.
More space or a better layout?
There are two key restrictions that might rule out extending; one is obvious. If you live with your family in an apartment and you intend to stay then you are working within the four walls and thatâs the end of it. Very, very occasionally families in this situation get the opportunity to buy adjacent apartments and amalgamate, and it can work, but itâs rare to have that opportunity. In apartments often there is potential to improve the way the kitchen connects with the living space without having to jump through hoops on fire regulation or with management companies. Beyond that it tends to require compromise to make any other big changes â losing an ensuite to gain storage for example. So it really does come down to ripping out the developerâs wardrobes and putting in something that uses up all of the available storage space. Clever (and that might mean custom-made) childrenâs furniture that combine beds and storage can also yield dividends, as well as providing the kids with their own interesting spaces.
 The other restriction that may rule out an extension is where the budget just wonât stretch to building on new space. As in the situation above, help lies in the form of changes to layout and storage to make things work. Very often with houses there is a discrepancy between the layout of the house and the way you want to use the space to live. For most young families this means that the living spaces of the house are small and divided into many separate rooms â layouts that havenât evolved the way family life has. Nowadays most people want a space that allows the family (and guests of various ages), to be comfortably together at key times, especially for meals and social gatherings (including playdates). Some house types are quite easy to make work in this way with key alterations. For example, if there are three main rooms on the ground floor: sitting room, dining-room and kitchen, you can combine these by forming new openings and doorways to give you maximum space for those busy times (morning, early evening, weekends). At the same time you can arrange things so that the whole ground floor is not permanently open-plan. This can mean deciding to only connect two of the three spaces (say kitchen and dining) and leave the sitting room on its own. Or it can involve the use of folding, or (better), sliding doors that allow you the best of both worlds, which is something you might need if the overall house is small.
 Another aspect of living in a house with small children is supervision. Again this is often pointed out by homeowners to me as a drawback of the older-fashioned house layouts. It is often enough for a parent (grandparent, or child minder) to have a half-view of where children are playing â to be able to issue warnings or instructions, hear trouble, or answer questions, without interrupting whatever important adult business is being conducted at the time. Again a degree of increased openness will help here, but it doesnât have to be a barn.
 Often the way the house is currently laid out will help to define the best approach â and that might mean having a flexible mindset around how to achieve a result you are happy with. You might have had an assumption that the kitchen had to be in an open plan space, but paying heed to the existing house and the budget might mean having a standalone kitchen and focusing on other areas to provide a larger social space. Even where you do have a standalone kitchen it is often possible to add somewhere for a guest to sit or a child to play that is out of harmâs way while a parent is slaving at the cooker. This whole approach gets even more pertinent where the house is very particular to begin with â often the case with small bungalows or rural housing, urban cottages, and old houses in general.
It is a point of view I often hear, that if you are going to extend you might as well build the biggest possible one you can. Itâs not that this view is always wrong, it just usually is! If youâre extending then you should be doing it for particular reasons, to achieve particular results, and once you have allocated enough space to do that then you should stop. I donât buy the argument that adding a bit more and a bit more again is going to relatively cheap, so you might as well... (This is one you often hear from builders who feel they have their foot in the door, when talking to homeowners who have not properly thought things out). Enough is as good as a feast and where budgets are hard-edged the economy of scale argument gets a bit academic â what will matter to you is how far you can get with the money you have to spend. The option of going into debt in order to finish the job is not really where you want it all to end so try to avoid overstretching.
 There are two key ways of creating a successful small extension. The first is where there is a small extension to a living space that serves an essential function or unlocks the overall space. Sometimes this can be as small and specific as a sunny window seat that changes how a whole space feels.
 The second is the small hard-working extension that takes care of the 'back of house' type functions and frees the rest of the house up. You can build a small extension that combines utility, storage, WC, or sometimes the kitchen, and the original spaces are left free to breathe easier. This is often especially appropriate if you have space to the side of the house.
Moving up the scale slightly, there are the options you might have if you were to build on say 20sq.m. or more of new space. It is worth reiterating here the warning given earlier about thinking through what you want to achieve in terms of lifestyle, not just how the extension works. A poorly considered extension can lead to dead space, dark spaces, poor flow through a house, and unused rooms.
The most common type of extension is probably making space for a multi-purpose family room at the back of a house, connecting to the garden. This is a need that many older and most more recent houses donât provide enough space for and it usually means opening up the back wall and building an extension so that the new and some of the original space work together to form the family room. Bear in mind that you also have to balance the size you build with how much garden you leave yourself. What is very important is ensuring that the space in the middle of the house doesnât become dark and unpleasant as a result of the extension. There are ways of tackling this. In all cases the judicious use of roof windows will help enormously â the closer to the existing house the better. After that, one approach is to put a zone of functional spaces into part of the dark middle zone â the downstairs WC, a utility room etc. This usually means having a front room that doesnât connect directly to the big space at the back, and thatâs ok as in most cases you will want a space to get away to anyway. It can make sense sometimes to actually reduce the size of the front room in the process. These are often too small to be the key social space in a house anyway, so they can work better as cosier evening-time spaces for you to retreat to. Sometimes of course the exact opposite approach makes sense, where you keep the front room open to the space at the back, usually with doors of some kind for flexibility. This can be particularly true where the best sun is at the front of the house, and you want to get the benefit of it. In such cases the challenge is to find space for the mundane things â the washing machine, the ironing board, the clothes horse â without making a mess of the layout in the process. It is easy to focus on the nice bits and neglect some of these practicalities, but if you do that you will regret it. Like the smaller scale changes above, with bigger extensions it also pays to work from an understanding of the house you have â the right extension is the one that solves your issues, for your house. Â
Converting a roof space is attractive because it's a relatively quick job and the cost is to some extent contained. A lot can be gained by setting it up as an accessible storage room or even converted into a fully integrated additional floor, but check out the fire regulations first as these are quite stringent and will have a bearing on what you can do. Before getting carried away by the opportunities however, and especially if you have a young family where the issues are usually day to day storage and quality of living space, then spending âŹ15K/ÂŁ12K on a roof space conversion is not going to solve the most pressing problems.
 One last observation â small children can get very excited about home renovation. For the majority of projects it is dangerous and inadvisable to stay on in the house with children while work is underway. Better to avoid danger completely and bunk in with granny, or rent, and expect a lot of questions from the kids about when they can go to live in their 'new house'! Â
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