Would you rather have separate Dining Room or Garage?

picky123

Converted our integral garage to dining room in december last year, after umming and arhing for 3 years !

Absolutely love it, should have done it years ago.

Wife used to put her clio in the garage, but when she swapped to a 3008 2 years ago it would not fit.

Garage started to get junked up with all kinds of rubbish which we had no actual use for.

Cissi

In any case I think it would be crazy to convert the room back to a garage! You sound very happy with the current layout, and as shown by the responses, a lot of people will agree. Yes, you'll lose those potential purchasers who are specifically looking for a house with a garage (and that would have included us) - but there will be plenty of others who prefer your set-up and the extra room.

hazyjo

If it was a large house, I'd say keep the garage (people paying certain bucks expect it). In a modest 3 bed, I'd say convert (seeing as you have driveway parking). A townhouse has recently done it near me (last in the row to convert) and the ground floor layout works much better now.

Jx

Mrs_Imp

Definitely a garage.

Pricivius

Garage, please. When I recently bought, I didn't look at anything that didn't have a garage. My mum was the same in her current purchase - must have a garage.

People have different priorities - obviously! For me, it's my car which has to be kept under cover. For other's it's a separate dining space. There's no right answer - you're cutting out some prospective buyers, whatever you do.

Building_Surveyor

Would Depend on how big the living room is for me. If the living room was the length of the house then I'd be inclined to keep the garage and put up a partition in the living room to make two seperate rooms, best of both worlds.

xsinaftersinx

Having a separate dining room has had a massive positive impact on family life for my family and I, it takes any distractions away from the kids at meal times and means we can always have proper family time each evening where we can all spend time discussing the day. It is also much less cluttered in the lounge, the kids have their rooms to play, the lounge is for family time and the dining room is to eat and do homework etc.

The house is also much less stressful, especially when my oldest has to do homework without the hassle of his little sister badgering him lol

firebird082

Gosh - I'm really suprised by all these people who would keep a garage over an extra reception room - do you all keep cars in them? A garage is completely irrelevent to me, but extra living space is very important. My OH would have liked a garage, but it would never be a deal-breaker without.

Sounds from the responses as if your potential purchasers are split half and half, so might as well leave it how is currently is and save some money!

forexmeister

Grampus8 wrote: »

I have a 3 Bed house with a garage conversion into a Dining room so we now have a nice large lounge which all the neighbouring houses have to double up as a dining area.

The downside is that there is no garage although there is ample room for 2 cars (side by side) on the drive.

The front and rear gardens have plenty of borders and plants but no grass therefore I have no need to store large garden items like lawnmower etc.

I have two questions:

1) Would you prefer the Dining room or a garage?
2) Would you think a separate Dining room would add value or would any price increase be negated by having no garage?

Thanks for your thoughts in advance!

I'd go for the garage. Apart from parking the cars, you also need a place to stash all your junk....old boxes, tools, paint cans, etc.

You can always eat in front of the tv ?

DaftyDuck

It does sound like you are considering this with a view to selling. It's not something that'd be worth any expenditure on, as whichever you opt for, you'll lose one pool of buyers or the other. You could, conceivably, work out the costs of conversion, and therefore be able to present any potential buyer with this as a costed option.

In my opinion, converted garages always look and feel like... converted garages.