Very bad and large and shapeless. Replanning tricky - tips

but our feeling at the moment is that no one wants us to build or everyone advises us against it because it probably isn't perfect.

The feeling deceives you. The advice against it is because the conversion you are considering is calculated very naively. What the result can be is a separate discussion.

With your budget, you are scraping the lower limit of what is possible – assuming zero nasty surprises await you. Even with plenty of your own work. Nasty surprises are, however, the rule and not the exception in such a project.

So it’s not about how the floor plan should look, but a step before that. In my opinion, you can’t financially handle such a project, 50k in subsidies doesn’t make a difference. Additionally, you are binding yourselves to maintenance costs beyond those of a normal house.

( I assume a budget of 350k for you? )

Kaho has actually pulled a pretty decent floor plan "out of thin air." Sad that an architect can't get any further...

I think I read somewhere about a bedroom being too small. The room should be 3.5x3.5 m (roughly estimated). That's not small. The bathroom, if I remember correctly, is 6 or 7 m long. That's really a lot! Theoretically, one could even enlarge the hallway at the expense of the bathroom and access the bedroom from the dressing room/hallway (instead of the vestibule) without the reduction in bathroom length being very noticeable.

Could it be that you have no concept of sizes so far?
If you were to draw furniture to scale sometime, you would find many points that need to be considered more closely.

And that's just the floor plan. Family constellations (e.g., ownership structures) and whether you can really accommodate a tenant above the still living elderly part would add on top of all my concerns.

Don't get me wrong: such a conversion can work. Doing the work yourself can work. But all the effort for a project where you should go from the vestibule into the bedroom...?

Not renovated Not much left except minor things was demolished. Quite a bit from the last 100 years or older came to light. Didn’t want to be the 3rd generation to sink money into old buildings. I also have no intention of restarting with cow and pig farming.

It would really be good for you if there are no surprises, but I wouldn’t count on that. Even 11ant has concerns and fears that the 50,000 barely covers surprises.

Roof beams don’t get younger and can break.

Electrical work can’t be installed in 4 weekends. Plumbing also has to do more than just hang toilet bowls. 1000 hours don’t sound like much if you want to do a lot yourself. By comparison, a 40-hour week without sick days amounts to about 1600 working hours per year.

Barrier-free can range from no thresholds (for those who just have a nagging hip) up to wheelchair accessibility. You need to be clear about how far you want to go. In my opinion, you don’t need to build a bungalow for aching bones.

The feeling is deceiving you. It is advised against because the conversion you are considering is calculated very naively. What the result can be is a separate discussion.

With your budget, you are scratching the lower limit of what is possible – provided there are zero nasty surprises waiting for you. Even with a lot of your own work. But nasty surprises are the rule, not the exception, in such a project.

So it’s not about how the floor plan should look, but one step before that. In my opinion, you cannot financially handle such a project, 50k in funding doesn’t make a difference. Additionally, you bind yourself to maintenance costs beyond those of a normal house.

( I assume your budget is 350k? )

We, of course, have no experience with such a project and have to rely on the architect who plans the whole thing, as well as on the structural engineer. We also know positive experiences, they are certainly rare, but my colleague built a 175m2 house including a basement and double garage for 250,000.....with a lot of his own work....3 years ago.....our neighbor also built a monstrous house with 240m2..with a double garage but without a basement, so it seems to be possible.

Our budget is 320,000 with a 10% buffer.

Here is a picture of the original building application, i.e. the first plan with fire safety regulations, and a picture of the longitudinal section of the stable plan from 1965

Why didn't you adopt the floor plan from the submission plan? Staircase and office would be [Atelier] and leave the rest?