Section 1 - The original downstairs

The house is split into 4 sections.. Section 1 is the original downstairs. This is the living room, dinning room, front hallway and stairs. It is encased in a stone wall that is approximately a meter wide. There is a chimney at either end of this original section and then in the centre of each of the walls between the chimneys are the only two doors which go out of the original lower floor of the house, the front door and the door to the kitchen.

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The above pictures show the current dinning room, front hallway with stairs and the sitting room. At the moment I really liking the size of the dinning room and I like the feel of the room, other than the weird fireplace cut out which I think is reducing the structural integrity of the chimney above it because of a lack of support above the cut-out. I am going to require a structural engineer in order to evaluate the chimney and what needs to be done to make it watertight, fireproof and if it needs to be decommissioned entirely to get it to be safe. Other than that problem I like the room at the moment and the plan is not to significantly change it.

The sitting room is an entirely different matter, at the moment it just feels weird and I don't really like it. I think it will be different once I remove the furniture, curtains and the flooring. The plan at the moment is to remove the wall between the sitting room and the hallway, creating a large living space downstairs connecting to the dinning room and the kitchen. In order for this to be possible the stairway needs to be moved as it is currently against that wall. The hallway feels like a somewhat waste of space because the main door people take into the house is in the kitchen and therefore that outside door is largely not used, which makes the hallway a large space with very little purpose other than the stairway. So removing the stairway and moving it against one the exterior walls will increase the usability of the space.

This is the current floorplan of the downstairs, the measurements are in centimetres. At moment it is essentially 2 4 meter square rooms with a 2.5 meter wide central hallway.

My first sketch for the downstairs is below:

This is by no means a final design. I am debating the side the stairs will be in the sitting room and the general internal structure however, I like the longer sitting room and keeping the dinning room to be the same size will allow me to have the spaces I want. So for now that is the first draft for house.