House – yet another update

So, it looks quite certain that we’ll buy the Hout Bay house. We had an architect-type person there today, and she liked the house. Everything we’d thought of doing there seem to be doable.

The house was built to have a main storey (with 4 bedrooms, 2 sitting rooms, kitchen, dining room, 2 bathrooms and a loo), a double garage underneath and a loft area.

The loft has been converted. There is currently a bathroom, bedroom and a large room with no particular use at the moment. We’re thinking of changing the roof to thatch, and having two additional windows . We’ll probably have two bathrooms and two bedrooms and a study up there. This depends on how costly it will be to change the roof to thatch.

We’re planning to knock down some walls in the main storey. We’ll loose one of the bathrooms, a bedroom and a loo, but we’ll have a bigger sitting room and a bigger dining room.

Then there’s the area downstairs (you can’t see it on the photo, as it’s under the further half of the house). It was designed to be a garage, but never used as one. There are two pairs of lovely French doors to the garden and the pool, and it would be a wonderful entertainment space. We’ll probably dig the ground about 60 cm (the engineer will go to the house tomorrow to evaluate this process). The foundations of the house will then need to be strengthened, but that should be no problem.