-
Got any plans?
Sounds like you need to spend a bit of money relocating the radiators in the living room to allow you to place furniture in places where it works for you. If the woodburner is in the hearth, install new wiring to the chimney breast to take your TV. Then you can use the alcoves for storage/shelves/posters/a desk.
Might even be wise to brick up the lower ground floor entrance so you can use it as a utility room/storage, provided you have a safe fire escape route from the basement (you probably will unless all the windows are barred and you have no garden and its open plan upstairs...)
If possible, build fitted storage into your new upper ground floor entrance hall to hold all your big winter coats/kids school stuff etc.
draughts-
Radiator replacement/relocation is def on the long-list of stuff for this house. We're budget constrained at the moment though and all the short term projects are dull functional things.
I love this house but can't help but feel that the space could be far better used, both in terms of rationalising usage. I'd love to see what a good architect and a fat budget could do to it. One day...
Dooks-Fatberg
In hallway related ponderings, we're attempting to change the way we use our house by re-fettling the hallway.
It's a Victorian terrace with steps from the street down to a basement kitchen/living room and steps up to a hallway and upstairs living room and office. We've been here 5 years and in that time i've really struggled with the layout of the basement kitchen/living room which is where we spend 90% of non-working daylight hours.
I always thought the problem was the shape of the space, because of chimney breasts, the stairs and giant ugly modern radiators the only bit of uncluttered wall space where you might put a sofa is right by the drafty front door. As a result we end up only using half the room with a small two seat sofa wedged in the bay and an armchair awkwardly in no-mans land nearby. It's a shame as the basement is where the woodburner, and telly are so it's theoretically the cosiest spot.
It recently occured to me that another major problem with the space is that as the basement door opens directly into the room, it ends up being used a hallway/corridor, between the door and the cupboard under the stairs in the kitchen where all the coats and shoes and key (and a blackhole of bags, clothes, kids craft projects, batteries and random crap) live. All this disfunction while the perfectly nice upstairs hallway sits empty and unused, except for a light scattering of bikes and books.
So the solution we have hit upon is to clear the upstairs hallway, put in a bench with shoe storage underneath and some luggage racks/coat hooks above and start using that as the way in and out of the house. The idea is that if we can make that work then we might porch-off the tradesman's entrance downstairs and start to use the whole width of the room.
I've fitted coat hooks and shoe racks and shelving for stuff that's not in current use at the rear of the hallway behind the stairs. Now I want to get a nice shoe-storage bench and some coat racks for the stuff that's in current use so we can start actually using the space as it was intended.
The problem at the moment is that we're only halfway through the transition and half the stuff you need when you leave the house is still downstair so you end up running up and down the stairs and cursing that you don't know where your keys or scarf are.