I am considering purchasing a house that for the past ten years has been an HMO (House of Multiple Occupancy - so each room is rented separately, with a shared kitchen). I'm in the UK.
Because of this, what would have been the two downstairs reception rooms are currently styled as bedrooms, complete with en-suite shower room each. The ground floor of the house also has a bit of a weird flow to it (no floorplan available so I drew one based on a video tour of the house. thin lines are windows, open lines are doors; it's not to scale. red line shows original house before extension. The image is oriented with East at the top, and the back garden is east-facing. All dimensions are height x width as far as I can tell):
Upstairs is fine, it's just a typical three-bed house (one en-suite and a family bathroom); all above the original home (i.e. the extension is single-story).
I'm not against knocking down walls etc. What can I do to make this house feel like a family home, and flow better between rooms; and also get light into the dining room?
My initial thoughts are:
Move the front door to the right of the stairs, and extend the dining room down into the hallway (remove the wall to the left of the dining room door, add a wall joining to the under-stairs cupboard with a door in it)
Remove the en-suite in the lounge and the dividing wall, and have patio doors out into the garden at the top of the image. From what I can see from old pictures, the lounge used to have that configuration anyway. I could then additionally add a door from the removed en-suite into the dining room, near the kitchen and block up the current door into the lounge.
OR, perhaps, to make it more of a Q&A type question, what in general gives a family home good "flow"? or Would the suggestions I have made be feasible, what sort of costs would I be looking at, and would they help the flow?