We almost bought a house with the 1/3 utility room and 2/3 lounge but budgetted to convert back to a more standard layout. But I know friends who have done this and don't regret it. However they all have unusually long kitchens and so can use the end of the kitchen as a pseudo playroom - so kitchen becomes more of a family room.

We use the middle room as a playroom. As the kids get older, it'll probably become more of a tv room / snug.

Our toilet is under the stairs - well, parallel to the hall and jutts into the kitchen very slightly. We've converted our basement into a utility room - I've seen this done quite a lot and isn't expensive to do if you have a reasonable height cellar to begin with. This left us maximum length of kitchen as we weren't losing a few foot to a toilet and then we also had the playroom.

Good luck making a decision. We considered so many different layouts.......

Thanks for all the great responses. Our sitting and dining room have previously been opened up into one large room. The main trouble is that we really want to include a utility and downstairs loo. We do have a cellar (under the hallway) so maybe we'll have to use that space somehow
Thanks

We knocked down the back wall to make it open plan with the kitchen. We kept the wall with the hall so you still have a hall. Leaving the hall means you can shut off upstairs which is good with the kids in bed.

Knocking down the back wall means we have a big dining table in the dining room and because it's easily accessible from the kitchen you use it every day.

The area by the patio windows at the back of the kitchen has a sofa and is essentially the kids play room.

This works well for us. Means none of the space is wasted. Makes the ground floor feel huge and dramatic and means there is light in the dining room.

Don't worry about the cornice. This can easily be replicated and you cannot tell in our house which cornice is original and which we replaced. They look identical and lots of companies locally do it.

If we sell, a future buyer can easily replace the wall with plasterboard, so it's not a big deal if somebody doesn't like the open plan effect. You do need a steel frame to stop the house falling down, so it does cost a bit though. Looks great in our house- I would totally recommend it.

This is not my house - but here's what it looks like in somebody else's:

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-46876448.html

[url]http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-46876448.html[/url]

When I was buying my house most of the rooms seemed to use it as a TV room/snug. I started off using my 'dining room' as a study, and now I have a grand piano in it so it is a music room! The people who had the house before me used it as a children's play room.

I think it is well worth keeping it if you can as it does give purchasers flexibility to use it as a variety of different rooms.

We use it as a TV snug room. We've closed off the access to the kitchen via the 2nd reception room (as i was very keen on an L shaped corner in the kitchen and, as you say, didn't want the 2nd reception to be a walk-through to the kitchen).

When we were buying i wasn't very keen on houses where the layout of the 2 reception rooms was massively changed - because i think they are the nicest rooms in the house, have the cornicing, etc.
This is, of course, personal.
A house with a non-standard layout wouldn't necessarily put me off, but i'd be willing to pay less for it as we'd need to modify the layout.
If you are planning to be in your house for a long time though, i think you should do whatever works for you (as it will be a while before you come to sell and by that time you would have fully enjoyed the layout of your choice).

Most houses in this area use that room as a playroom - to (attempt to) keep the children's stuff out of the kitchen and front reception. I wouldn't take away that option lightly, even if you don't have small children any future buyer may!

If you split the room 2/3 1/3 that will mean redoing any cornicing and also may mean redoing any partition or beam which currently sits between the two reception rooms.

Other uses I've seen for the smaller back reception room: TV snug (so the front room is smarter and tv-free); study with lots of bookshelves; grand piano (seriously!); dining room (hardly ever).

Some people take down the wall to the hallway so the back room is open plan to the stairs - makes everything feel more spacious, though obviously it does make it more of a corridor in some ways.

We left half of the dining room as our living room and created a utility room and downstairs loo with the other half. Love the layout. We have a good size eat in kitchen, a front lounge and a place to hide the piles of laundry! It really works for us.

We are about to do the side return in our mid-terrace house, very similar to most of the houses round here. The current 'dining room' quite often seems a wasted space without a real purpose in many houses other than to walk through to the large kitchen diner so we want to avoid that.

What have you/you seen this space being used for? One suggestion is to split the current dining room/second reception room in 3rds and 2/3 add to the front reception room (making it more of a rectangle rather than a square) and the other 1/3 can be used for utility and downstairs loo. Would this put you off if you were a buyer and wild expect 2 reception rooms?

Any suggestions or ideas we could consider would be much appreciated
Thanks