5 Terraced House Remodeling Mistakes… And How To Avoid Them

When it comes to creating extra space in a terraced house, remodelling the layout is an excellent but very underutilised way of doing it.

Why Is Remodeling So Under Used In The UK?

Remodeling is a great way of creating more space in your home, improving the flow of your property and make it a much better place to live in.

The classic terraced house layout isn’t very efficient for modern living (it dates back to the 1600’s!) but knowing what tweaks to make and where will unlock a load of previously unused liveable space.

However, remodeling is one of those things that can go badly wrong if not thought out properly.

And it does require professional design advice.

So we’re going to look at what can go wrong in this blog post and how to avoid it going wrong for you.

After you go through this article you’ll know how to approach remodeling your home like a pro!

You can drastically transform the layout of your home and as a result increase your level of comfort & standard of living by reconfiguring its layout.

PLUS reconfiguring the layout of your home is the cheapest way to create more space in your home and you can do it without requiring planning permission.

It will feel like you did in fact move into a new home such is the difference remodelling can make.

However there is a flip side to all this.

If a house is remodelled or reconfigured incorrectly then it will make a complete balls out of your home.

It’ll actually make it worse to live in.

We’ve seen the same remodelling mistakes made over & over again…

…and we’ve boiled it down into the 5 mistakes we’ll discuss here so you can avoid them.

So let’s get going!

Remodeling Mistake 1 – Making Isolated Modifications

Making isolated changes to individual rooms without considering the flow or circulation of the entire floor as a whole is a major error.

Flow/circulation is how each space relates to each other and it acts as the connective cohesiveness to your home.

There are several factors that we need to take into account such as frequency of use, time of use, type of use, etc.

But what’s most important about it is that flow directly affects your emotional state as you wander about your home.

We need to be able to define each space on its own merits but also how each space interacts with its adjacent spaces.

This might sound like a load of architectural nonsense but believe me, it makes a massive difference to how you live in your home.

In terms of square footage, the better the circulation the more liveable space is available to you.

The worse the circulation the more pockets of unused or unusable space get created.

Another important issue is making changes that affect natural light getting into spaces.

A lack of light makes spaces in your home uncomfortable to be in.

Take a moment to think about your home now as it currently stands.

I’m betting that you spend as little time as possible in the darker parts of your ground floor for example.

Remodelling/reconfiguring the layout of your home needs to have as much, if not more, consideration for the adjacent spaces affected by the changes to the specific area itself.

Keeping this in mind will ensure that whatever changes you do make will work in isolation AND as a whole, making your home a far superior place to live in.

Remodeling Mistake 2 – Underestimating The Structural Work Required – A Bit Techie This One

This one is probably the most frequently committed one of all so pay good attention to this one.

Removing part or all of some load bearing walls in your house requires that steel beams are put in to support whatever is above them.

The big mistake here is that steel beams deflect under the weight of what is above them. In other words they bend and the longer the span the worse this is.

Now this doesn’t mean the beams will collapse, but the excessive movement is important.

The knock on effect here is that if the beam deflects too much, what happens is that whatever walls are supported above the beam will crack.

So you end up with cracked plasterboard in the floors above which of course looks terrible.

Make sure you ask your engineer or builder how they intend on addressing this.

The usual method is to ‘jack up’ the steel beams, in other words the beam is pre-cambered, i.e. curved upwards so when it deflects it moves back into a straight line.

You don’t need to understand the mechanics of this but you do need to make sure your builder is going to factor this in if they are going to be taking out long sections of your walls.

Cracked external walls will let water in so your builder needs to take precautions to ensure he doesn’t crack any of your walls when remodelling your home.

Remodeling Mistake 3 – Not Looking At Door Positions In Rooms Too

The most underused remodelling tactic is looking at door positions into rooms.

Doors in terraced houses are usually located in places near the end of the rooms.

This means that you can’t place furniture against the adjacent wall because it will simply block the door.

Moving the door inwards a bit allows us to have more flexibility when it comes to furniture and it creates a lot more storage space in the room than you would have otherwise.

Here is an example:

Remodeling Mistake 4 – Not Using Interior Design Tricks To Make Your Rooms Feel Bigger

We’re going to talk a bit about interior design now and I’ll admit that this isn’t uniquely applicable to remodelling, it applies to homes in general.

There are some interior design tricks we can use to manipulate our senses so we can feel if a room is smaller or larger than it is in reality.

One trick is to have a view to the outside world from every room in your house.

The classic example is your front living room (or bedroom).

By creating a doorway in the wall that separates the dining room from the living room you can create a viewpoint where you can view out to your rear garden from this front room.

The effect is that you will feel that your ground floor is a lot bigger than it really is.

Using the layout of your home to divert your gaze further manipulates your senses to feel that the space is bigger than it really is.

There are a series of these little ‘optical illusion’ tricks you can apply to your home.

I might do a full blog post on these ‘optical illusions’ if enough people request it in the comments section below.

Remodeling Mistake 5 – Making Large Changes When Small Tweaks Would Have Done The Job

I love the saying ‘big doors move on small hinges’ and it’s very apt to remodelling.

Some small layout tweaks here & there make all the difference and are often all you need instead of wholesale changes.

Terraced house layouts might be out of date but they aren’t wholly unsuitable either.

All it takes is a bit of ingenuity and some specialised knowledge and you can transform your home into something that feels far superior to what you currently have.

Small tweaks are also very inexpensive and don’t require large scale structural works.

And we can help you with this!

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Thanks for checking our Remodeling mistakes post! If you have any questions then just pop them into the comments section below.

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