Some point before Alex was born I decided that my current house isn’t big enough. It’s three bedrooms, but the master bedroom is upstairs. That is fine but with a new born baby we didn’t want to keep walking up and down. So we moved our bedroom downstairs. But then we realised that if we ever have any more kids this won’t work.

So I went and bought a new much bigger house. The new house is kind of old. 1890’s we were told. It’s a decent size, 5 bedrooms, swimming pool, on half an acre. It’s half way between my family in Walsall and Sarah’s family in Wolverhampton. So it ticks a lot of boxes. It’s kind of run down which is fine because I would rather buy a house and renovate and get it how we want than move into a brand new house and have to put up with how it was. This time I wanted to get all the work done before moving in.. instead of living in a house that is half a building site. Especially with a new baby.

So I got an architect around, told him what I wanted to spend, what I wanted to do. And the obvious answer that he came up with was to tear it down and build a new house. This would be faster, everything would be brand new, we’d get more for our money because there’s no VAT charged on new builds.. and most importantly we’d get what we want.

So now we’re in a position where we can make the house we want. Which is a really awesome position to be in. We’re thinking about what we want the house to be, what we want to use it for, planning for the future. I came up with this document for the architect describing what I think we need.

So the question is.. if you were doing this what would your house be like, what special features would you have?