If the past few years have shown us anything, it is that people are starting to value their homes more. With ever-increasing house prices, it can make a lot of sense to stay where you are, improve your home, and adapt it to meet your growing family’s needs rather than move to a new, more expensive house.
To improve rather than move can take a lot of careful forethought and advanced planning. If you are going to perform significant internal changes to your home to make your rooms more multifunctional, it pays to get your layout plans just right.
A good floor plan is essential, with more focus on transforming the living room into a more adaptable space for the family. This can mean removing internal walls to make more space to accommodate everyone’s needs.
Removing internal walls
Modern living rooms need to be able to multitask. You will still need space to relax and unwind, but you may also need a well-lit area to work in, homework space for the kids, enough room to stretch out on the floor for yoga or home workout sessions etc., but you need to make a clean break between all areas.
It isn’t as simple as arranging the furniture around the edges of the room. If you need to shift furniture to create enough floor space for a workout, or you don’t have the room or an empty corner to fit in a workstation and an office chair, then your living room isn’t working for you.
It may become inevitable that your internal walls will have to come tumbling down to accommodate all the activities you need. Whether this means knocking down the wall between your kitchen and living room and creating a multi-purpose breakfast bar and workstation, or removing the wall to your dining room to make your living room more extensive, then you need to be careful about removing any internal walls, especially if they are load-bearing.
Removing load-bearing internal walls
One of the most sensible moves to expand your flexible living space is to remove the wall between your living room and dining room. This doesn’t mean you will be losing your dining room entirely. There are very clever table designs available today that can switch from being a workstation into a dining table with innovative folding and height-adjustable options.
You can also move your plug sockets around to make it easy for daytime charging for your laptop and other electrical devices, and for a standard lamp that can double as a desk light during the day and for evening dining illumination.
Expanding into your living room can also mean you will have space to set up your Peloton Bike in front of a screen or create a workout area for the family to enjoy without it encroaching into your relaxation space.
However, if the wall between your living and dining room is a load-bearing wall, you should enlist our help to make the calculations you need for your load-bearing replacement support structure.
You can find out more about our load-bearing wall services or contact our team to discuss your needs.
