Converting + Attaching Detached Garage

[kitkat9933]

We are looking at purchasing a new property (Georgian House) that has a large but basic 36m2 garage about 1m away from the side of the house.

To make an additional large open space, we are thinking about opening up what's labelled the Kitchen/Dinning room (moving the dinning room to one of the other sitting rooms) and then bridging into the detached double garage (which will mean we will need to knock down and connect the two buildings together) to make a large open plan kitchen/living space.

I've no idea how much this type of project should cost and no builders will estimate it as we don't own it yet. So was wondering what sort of costs I should plan for so if anyone could help it would be much appreciated!


Some things I do know the price off:

• Large 5m wide patio aluminium sliding doors + some velux sky lights+ some front windows into the garage ~ £7000 inc ifitting
• The garage has power, water and drainage already.
• Roof is in good shape
• the garage has front and rear doors that will need bricking up/replaced by windows.
• a steel beam will be needed to extend the kitchen/dinning room

Is £50-60k for the building works (excluding fittings/furniture and the kitchen itself etc) realistic?

 

[kitkat9933]

Do it in glass. A glass link would be super nice!

That’s the plan !

 

[kitkat9933]

you can add another £15K onto the budget then. Large glass panes aren't cheap especially if being used as walls.

why not just keep it separate and turn it into a games room?

As we want a very large open kitchen/living space. The house is fairly large with many rooms, but being an old house, not many make sense for this type of space.

 

[kitkat9933]

I would knock down the garage and build something purpose built. Garage conversions always look like garage conversions and pretty much all garage conversions look naff.

As others have said, you'll run into issues that make it not impractical like insulation, heating, floor heights and looking like a garage with windows instead of doors. To make it look right you'll probably want to put on bi-folds in the back to get the light in and open up the space to outside.

The other option is to buy a house with enough downstairs space instead of trying to 'bodge' on an extension on the cheap.

thanks for the advise. I’m not trying to build an extension on the cheap, but work out what I should put to the side to do it properly. Cheap is not in my vocabulary

There aren’t many houses over 2,500 sq ft in the area we want to move to for work, except new builds which are a no no.