Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Just like with any significant relationship in your life, you can fall in and out of love with your home. You can get frustrated with its limitations, long to leave or yearn to stay — if only it would change. But instead of packing up and starting afresh, in the past few years we have become more used to engaging in big overhauls. Last year, the number of planning consents for householder developments in England totalled 160,000, with a further 11,000 permitted development rights issued to cover larger extensions. The online learning platform Create Academy, previously more often used for crafts, cookery or decorating advice, has just released a detailed, nine-hour practical course by the interior designer Rita Konig dedicated to planning and managing home renovations.Konig says that it is unrealistic to expect a property to suit us throughout our lives without some adaptations. “We grow and change, and so should your home,” she says. While the temptation can be to move, improving your current home “can be even better than buying somewhere new because you get to stay in a space that you know, and then really make it work for you”, says Konig. “You have a chance to make it really right.” The interiors trends forecaster Samantha Palmer agrees that “there is a big trend” for people improving over moving. She cites the rise in multigenerational living (it is the fastest-growing household type in England and Wales in 2024) as a key driver. “People are looking to make their current kitchen more accessible for elderly relatives, adding more bathrooms to accommodate multiple generations in one home, or looking for defined spaces dedicated to their grown-up kids or older relatives.”One project that was longlisted for New London Architecture’s annual Don’t Move Improve awards is typical of small changes that have a big impact. Architects Magri Williams worked on a north London terraced house. Its inhabitants, Sandy Gill, a website developer turned homemaker, and her husband Declan Harrington, an IT consultant, had bought the house in 2013 with a small galley kitchen — “a bit annoying, it was not a big deal”, says Gill. But when they had their son Ciaran, now five, frustrations set in. “Cooking in the kitchen felt really isolated and depressing, which I just didn’t need as a new mum,” Gill says.Williams planned a renovation which has “totally transformed the way we live”. The build took six months, finishing in August last year, including an extension to the kitchen with floor-to-ceiling doors and a small courtyard connecting the back room to outside space. It is now used as a playroom but it can evolve. “We’re envisioning it as a space for my husband’s mom,” says Gill, who grew up in a series of apartments in tower blocks in various places around her native Canada, moving each year until she was 20. She is determined, in contrast, to make this the family’s “forever home”.Other projects on the longlist included an extension built from a low-carbon cement called LC3, the first in the UK to use the material. Federico Ortiz of NLA says all the projects reflect a need to “adapt with their changing needs, such as accommodating to growing families or the desire to future-proof their homes, for example by reducing water consumption”. Either way, he adds, “remodelling adds longevity and efficiency to homes.” Konig is a living example of remodelling when the house ceases to suit its owner. She originally bought her one-bedroom flat in an Edwardian town house in west London 12 years ago and before moving in, she redesigned it with all the trappings a single woman in her early thirties fresh back from living and working in New York needed (a small kitchen and a dressing room). When she met her husband-to-be and was pregnant with her daughter Margot, “I thought it’s already taken so long, I don’t want to move.” She adapted the space again, buying a studio flat next door and knocking through to create a large master bedroom with a little bedroom for the baby.Last month, after yet another life change — she has just turned 50 and is newly divorced — she finished another round of works, incorporating the flat directly above hers, moving the bedrooms upstairs and putting the kitchen into a bigger space: “I had visions of big Sunday lunches so that I could have friends with children over.” She says she is glad that she has stayed, not least because the house is the only place her daughter has lived. “We did change it completely and that was quite emotional.” They had taken Polaroid pictures of things that were important to them before the builders moved in.As part of her latest Create Academy course, Konig has detailed the steps she took over her two-year project, including practical lessons, such as how to sequence an installation, the importance of scheduling spreadsheets for contractors and managing a budget.She also describes a project she worked on in the Hudson Valley, belonging to her friend Deborah Needleman, formerly editor-in-chief of The New York Times’ T Magazine, and her husband Jacob Weisberg. The couple had bought an 18th-century Dutch colonial property in 1995 before they had children — it was a weekend house to escape busy New York lives. It had an idiosyncratic layout. For example, the entrance to the house was straight into a small, dark kitchen. Needleman enjoyed its quirks for a long time — “we made it liveable” — but there came a point when they wanted an overhaul. They asked Konig to help with the plans, which included a modest extension, adding a larger sitting room, a porch and a bedroom above, which allowed them to move the kitchen to a new spot, creating a light-filled cooking-cum-dining space. In an “awkward leftover space”, Konig created a flower-arranging room for Needleman, who left her jobs in media to become a basket weaver.The works have “transformed the entire house”, according to Needleman, making it a place she now lives in full time. “I doubt if I would have done that before because it was very much a weekend house. Now it’s a place I fully inhabit.”Not that an improvement needs to be so ambitious. Romanos Brihi, co-founder and partner of the interior design practice Studio Vero, says that repurposing even a single room can provide “a tangible improvement to the way your home works for you and make you more inclined to stay. For one client we worked with, we placed a circular table in the dining room, with a section in the middle that could be lifted out to reveal plug sockets, creating the perfect work-from-home space for the family. For special suppers a few times a year, the table reverted to a dining table for celebratory gatherings.”Improvement costs — just as with remodelling a new-to-you house — can be as big as you make them. Ortiz says that on the NLA longlist of entrants, prices for improving properties range from £25,000 to £900,000. Brihi says ballpark figures are hard to pin down, but recent side returns and lofts have cost between £150,000 and £300,000, excluding VAT, with a recent loft in Belgravia costing £800,000. He says improving — rather than moving — could be money well spent. “In terms of investment, once you’ve bought a new home, paid a premium for an extra bedroom or bigger kitchen, stamp duty and estate agent fees, that money could be better utilised in enlarging your existing home.” Konig agrees that adding to her flat saved thousands in stamp duty: “I was only buying one small flat, so the stamp duty was quite small; if I’d bought a whole new house, it would have been huge.” While neither Konig nor Needleman have had their respective homes revalued, both assume the works have added value.Liza-Jane Kelly, head of London residential at estate agents Savills, agrees that “almost any money you put into extending pays back when you come to sell, as long as it’s done well. People have to be careful about sinking money into basements if they don’t consider light, but we see side returns and loft extensions add at least the amount spent on to the value of they house.”For Gill, the money on her renovation has been well spent. The works were “a lot of money, but it has felt worth putting that into the renovation rather than buying something else, which wouldn’t have been exactly right, or even saving it. You can’t buy back this time with children.”Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
