Archives for April 2015

When you invest in a property in London that you think will be suitable for the needs of your family, you often need to be able to see the bigger picture. Those that expect a property to be completely finished and perfect for them to move into straight away don’t always find what they are looking for. Those that recognise the potential of a property and are prepared to invest in money and work into changing it for the better tend to have more success.

This is because it is quite rare to find a property that already looks after all of your interests in terms of the way it is laid out, how it is designed, its decorative features, the way space is treated therein, how much storage space it affords and so on. Each family is different and has different requirements, so it is fortunate that houses can be manipulated to match changing needs.

However, larger scale projects are the domain of professionals. It is important to get in touch with a London team of designers and builders as a means of turning a home with potential into a home that genuinely fits the requirements of your family.

It can be hard to operate in a house that is fairly cramped and does not make the most of the space it is endowed with. This situation is something that countless homeowners experience. They recognise that it is not just about square yardage, but also about how space is used to make an interior environment more open, more useful and more attractive.

A lot of people who choose to have renovation work done on their London homes do so because they want a professional team to come round and draw up plans that help their home to realise some of its potential. It is often the case that homes were not built in a way that accentuated the space available to them and modern residents of London regularly seek to correct this.

They do so by getting a team of designers and builders in to work on a project that opens up parts of the house. Downstairs areas, hallways and landings are often the focus of this sort of operation because modern homemakers are keen on improving their spaciousness and sociability to make them contribute more positively to the house.

You can achieve so much more from your renovation if you let professional architects and designers provide their input. This will allow you to make full use of the opportunity you have to make something of your interiors. London architects and designers are fabulously creative people and when they look at your interiors they will already have ideas on how to improve them.

Obviously your designers will work according to the brief that you set them. Communicating with them effectively is a big part of getting project started. You will explain what you want out of the project and you tell them some of the things you consider necessary in terms of your tastes and in terms of the practical changes you would like to make.

Your team will then give you more ideas concerning the project – things that perhaps only professionals in the field would be able to pick up on. Their advice is really valuable at this stage. All drawings they produce as a result of the meetings you have with them will be presented for your approval and when you agree on a plan they can put it into action.

It is possible to renovate your kitchen and have an extension carried out at the same time. What a lot of people value at home is a spacious kitchen that actually backs onto a conservatory which in turn sets up a wonderful transition between house and garden. This is a fabulous way of making more of the space at the back of your house – something that is particularly attractive in London homes.

This is partly because a lot of London homes have plenty of character, but not too much in the way of open space. You can change this by extending into your garden, admitting more natural light with a nice conservatory and renovating your kitchen so that it backs openly onto the conservatory and makes the two rooms part of the same space.

This allows you to make the downstairs of your home that much more sociable and more comfortable. The brightness of this arrangement is incredibly appealing visually and it enables you to make something more of your kitchen instead of it fulfilling merely practical functions. Renovation teams are generally very experienced in this line of work.

When you house is starting to show its age you may find that you have to address problem after problem. In many cases, having people in to take care of all these things represents a significant cost and it does not always leave you with fantastic results. Too much work conducted by too many separate outfits can leave your home with a somewhat fragmented maintenance history.

In order to keep everything together, it might be worth trying to get all your repairs in each part of the house carried out at once. For instance, if it becomes apparent that your insulation downstairs needs sorting out, but you also want to re-plaster the kitchen and sort out the floor in the dining room, you could just have the entire ground floor renovated.

This represents a big investment, but it sorts all your problems out at once and gives you the opportunity to re-design the space at the same time. This often proves to be a positive way of doing things and it leaves you with results that could never be described as underwhelming or fragmented.