front door into living room

hoir14

So we have finally had an offer accepted on a house and we are just finalising the details before exchanging contracts
now, we both love the house (3 bed terrace, standard 2 up, 2 down with a loft conversion and a kitchen extention to the rear) but i hate walking directly into a living room through the front door!! (the current set up is the dining room at the front as it is the smaller of the reception rooms) then walk through to the middle room (living room) then right to the back for the kitchen.

Any ideas to buffer the entrance into the house? having the dining room at the front and living room in the middle is good because it gives us more living space as we wont use the dining room much, but walking through the living room to get to the dining room with food from the kitchen is less than ideal!!

(the stairs cut across the middle between the living and dining rooms so unless we were to rotate the stairs there would be no chance of opening it up)

Any ideas????

shortcrust

No one around where I live uses the front door of terraces like that. It's always down the alley and in via the kitchen at the back.

CakeCrusader

My house is exactly the same, I use the room at the back as the living room, the front room's the dining room/study. If I had the cash I'd put up a stud wall in the front room to partition it off, creating a hall way from the front door to the back room. Folding doors would give pretty much the same effect but you could open them up if you needed to. You could use the room as a play room/dining room/snug/study and you'd have a hall. My dining table (seats 6) would fit in easily if I did this but it depends on how big your front room is.

FreeBear

Most of the smaller terrace houses round here have a similar setup with the front door opening up straight in to the front room. A fair number have had a porch built on to the front, either full brick with tiled roof, or uPVC on a dwarf wall (think mini conservatory).

Look around at other houses in the neighbourhood and use that as a guide as to what you can do. Of course, if your front door opens straight out on to the path, a porch is not going to be feasible.

dunroving

Get on the Rightmove House Prices section of the RM site and look at the photos for other houses on the street. That will show you what others have done and whether they seem to work.