Planning A Layout

Identify What Works And What Doesn’t

You’ve got to start with why your house isn’t working in the first place. It sounds obvious, but what I do is walk around the house and make a list of what doesn’t work. What doesn’t work for me is wasted space – long corridors, hallways that are too big for the house, over-sized bedrooms and over-sized bathrooms. At the end of the day with a bedroom, you’re going to put a bed and a wardrobe in there, go in and sleep. The Brixton house is a good example of inefficient – a massively oversized bathroom that was a complete waste of space, which we turned into another bedroom.

Are Your Rooms Working For You?

The second golden rule for me is to make the spaces efficient. You might have a desk in your bedroom. You might have a wardrobe five times bigger than mine. It’s about your needs. You need to make a space personal, you need to make it work for you. So, how do you make it work? You might need to declutter. You might need to change the layout – move the bed to a different part of the room, so you can get a desk under a window. Or you might need to add space - either by extending out or by taking space off another room. It sounds ridiculously obvious, but if your kitchen isn’t big enough but you have a massive dining room, nick some of the dining room and give it back to the kitchen or smash the wall down and have an open plan kitchen diner. It’s what I did in Brixton – they got everything back, they didn’t lose anything. I didn’t extend, I nicked space and I gave them an extra bedroom. You’ve got to be a space thief. You’ve got to be quite brave.

Steal Space Whenever You Can

You’ve got to hunt for that space, you’ve got to see where the possibilities are. When you think there’s a possibility of it being there, you’ve got to draw it. Everyone says to me they can’t draw, but they can, it’s rubbish. Get a tape measure out. Measure the spaces. You might have to get a bath catalogue and find out how big a bath is. You can then work out how far you need to move the wall into your bedroom. You might then have to measure your bed – can it fit in if you move the wall, will I get bedside tables in? You’ve got to become an amateur designer, an amateur architect. The Home Show will give people the confidence to know they can do it – and the room planners on the show will help, too.

Use Tricks To Create A Sense Of Space

Even though you might not add floor area to a space, how can you create a greater sense of space? Maybe you can raise a ceiling? I walk around houses and tap on walls and ceilings. I find a non load-bearing wall or a false ceiling, I think, ‘we can have that out’. There might be some practical reasons that you can’t remove something but if you can remove something that’s been put up for a bad DIY reason, you can probably take it out and the sense of space in that room will be much greater.

Use Natural Daylight To Your Advantage

Get as much natural light in a space as possible, by whatever means. It makes a massive difference. A house doesn’t have to be painted all white, you just need to perhaps add a skylight over a staircase, take the opportunity to make a window bigger. You might have a room with just one small window. What are you going to do? Put in a bigger one. It’s obvious, but you need to be brave to do it.

Have A Priority List – And Stick To It

What I do is have a priority list of what I think a house needs. So if changing the boiler is A, that’s what I do, even if we use slightly cheaper tiles and cheaper timber flooring at the end of the job. If a window needs to be made bigger, that’s what I’ll prioritise… I think if you get the space right and compromise on the finishes, you could always come back to those later. So, if the proportions of the rooms are right, the natural lighting is right, you’ve got the services and structure right, but you have to have a cheap laminate floor, then do it – when you’ve earned a few extra quid next year, you can rip it up and put a nice oak floor down. If you spend the money on a nice oak floor but the windows aren’t right, you’ve compromised the room – you haven’t prioritized on what’s important.

Be Confident About Your Taste

How do you create something that’s not bland? That’s down to good personal taste really. If you struggle to identify what your taste is, take influence from other people’s spaces, the 4Homes website or seeing things you really like – wallpaper coverings, nice colours. That’s where you’ve got to be brave. It’s so easy for people to say ‘oh, let’s just paint it white’ or ‘I can’t decide’, but you’ve got to say, this is our house, this is our home, and I want it to be about me. If you find something you like but that someone else might not – just go for it. It’s your home at the end of the day.

Hope you find this useful