Collage of mid-century modern furniture and decor, including a green sofa, patterned rug, white chair, wooden lamp, decorative light fixture, and beige striped fabric. Text reads "mid century colour palette" and "bench seating."

JOURNAL | RENOVATION

From cold garage to stylish family living space - part 1: the plan

When we started house hunting in 2023, we’d just had our daughter and were by no means anticipating starting a huge renovation project. I think my words were ‘I’ll paint and do flooring but I don’t want to be ripping out a kitchen.’ Little did I know, after months of browsing Rightmove and scrolling straight past our house thinking ‘no way,’ we’d eventually view it and both immediately see it’s potential.

Onto one of the main parts of our renovation - the garage conversion. From planning permission, uncertainty, doubting the design then finally starting the build, join us on the journey to turn this dark and disused space into the heart of our family home.

Interior of a dimly lit, neglected garage with brick and concrete walls, empty shelves, and assorted paint cans on the floor. There's a handwritten note saying "dark and disused space."
Interior of a garage with a partially open door, a person standing outside, holding a measuring tape, paint cans and a black crate on the floor, and a light bulb hanging above.
Collage of home renovation process showing exterior work, interior construction with plastered walls, wooden subflooring, and a paint can.

Once the plastering began, it really started to feel more like a room!

Ok here we go. August 2023. We’d been looking for a house for a while but anything in the area that was in our budget was a project, and a huge project at that. After sitting down and realising that realistically - if we wanted to be in the area we would have to take on a project, we viewed our house.

The garage was a space that we quite quickly decided we would convert, after seeing that our next door neighbour had done so and that it was a great use of an otherwise dead space. Some of my family were dubious about the size and how it would work as a living room, as it was quite a narrow space with a low ceiling, which would have be made even lower when the floor was made level with the rest of the house. In hindsight, we could have perhaps had a step down the living room which might have zoned it quite nicely and created added interest, but that’s the trouble with a large renovation - decision fatigue! You become a bit renovation blind and with no architects we just didn’t think of it at the time. We thought that perhaps we could create a vaulted ceiling (I’d been watching a lot of ‘Your Home Made Perfect’) to give us extra height and the feeling of extra space.

Before starting any of that, we had to get planning permission. Something to do with losing a parking space (although I don’t think you could have fit a car in there anyway!) I wasn’t too worried about it being granted for the garage as next door (and some others on the road) had done the same, I was more worried about getting the front door relocation approved, but more on that in another post.

Once planning permission was granted, we could get on with the build!

Firstly, we had to move a bunch of electrics. My father-in-law and brother-in-law were rewiring the whole house for us (very grateful!) and we had to start by moving the old fuse board from the far side of the garage. I won’t go into the detials (to be honest I don’t even really understand them!) but once that was all done we could get on with blocking up the door, creating the new window opening and building the new sub floor.

We also decided to add a skylight to the new vaulted ceiling, which really has made a huge difference, and brought a lot more light into this north facing room.

Architectural drawing showing original and proposed elevations of a building. The left side depicts the original rear elevation with simple windows and a garage. The right side shows proposed plans with notes indicating changes such as the relocation of the front door, use of reclaimed bricks, matching windows, and improved natural light.
Handwritten "To be continued..." on white background.