Home renovations for our new baby

 

Our home renovations have started! I am currently pregnant with our second baby which will be due in May 2017. We are very lucky to live in a 3/4 bed semi-detached house so baby girl will be able to have her own nursery when she arrives.

 

I say 3/4 as we have already repurposed the smallest box room as a walk in wardrobe for our main bedroom. Whether this was wise or not I still haven’t decided, but it does mean that we only have 2 other useable bedrooms.

 

One of these bedrooms belongs to Rosalie but the other one has become a junk room. It houses a double bed, spare furniture, a desk, my iMac and our filing cabinet. It is an office/guest room of sorts but it doesn’t really fulfil either function very well. In all honesty, we don’t need a spare bed. I think we have only had one friend stay over in 5 years, but an office space is invaluable. Especially as I plan to build up my business and work from home more and more. We started to look at the home renovations we could do to create more space in our home.

 

The first option we considered was an extension. Our house has already been extended to its maximum potential by the previous owners. We have a fairly small plot and it isn’t viable to extend the footprint of our home anymore so this was swiftly crossed off the list.

 

We then thought about converting our loft space. We have a substantial loft space as our property has been extended previously. If we were to do a loft conversion, we could create a wonderfully large and light filled space with the use of roof windows like these pvc roof windows with safety glass from Solstro. The quality seems to be good for a decent price. Loft conversions cost upwards of £20,000 and with a new baby on the way we didn’t think that it was the right time for us to take on a project this big.

 

Which leaves us with the final option of converting our integral garage. If you have followed my home renovations you will know that in 2014, when I was expecting Rosalie (There is nothing like pregnancy to spur you into some building work!) We converted half of our integral garage to form a separate utility room. This was fairly straight forward to do with Nick and his dad doing most of the work themselves. The rest of the garage was left as it was, and we have since used this as garage storage.

 

We are now considering converting the rest of the garage to form a study/office. It won’t be as big as I would ideally like but with a garage conversion costing on average £5000, it is the most cost effective solution. As we hope to do most of the work ourselves we think we can do it for half of this, the only real expense being the installation of a new window so this is what we have decided to do.

 

I would really like to have this finished by the time baby arrives. With only 14 weeks left it is all systems go, wish us luck!

Have you converted a garage before? Do you have any tips?