THE SOLUTION: Chetana’s daughter, Tara, must be an unusually patient seven-year-old to allow Mum to use her bedroom as an office. Clearly things cannot continue as they are, but a satisfactory solution is not easy to come by. The best option may be to move to a larger home.

Digging deep: Chetana needs to create at least a five-bedroom home out of her three-bedroom terrace. If she is to have five bedrooms she should really build a second bathroom to avoid those morning queues. An extension, upwards or outwards, that would give her this amount of extra space would be out of the question given the conservation area, not to mention the difficulty of getting natural light into any new bedrooms at the core of the house.

Chetana might consider excavating to create an entirely new lower-ground floor. In the past two years basement construction has become big business as people realise how much extra space they have underfoot without having to negotiate tricky planning applications. Basements are expensive, though: expect to pay about £300 a sq ft plus VAT, which would mean Chetana needs a budget of roughly £200,000. On London properties the equation may make sense but on a Brighton house of this kind, worth approximately £350,000 with a potential value of up to £450,000 for five bedrooms, the maths simply does not add up in the short term. So Chetana and her husband need to think carefully about how long they plan to stay in the house and be honest about their confidence in the property market. If they plan to stay twenty years and they feel the market will continue to rise throughout that period, then it may be worth making the investment.

If that is so there are specialist basement building companies that know how to admit the maximum amount of natural light and ventilation. They will be able to check the level of the water table and make the necessary provisions as well as take care of the permissions. These will include party wall agreements and conservation area consent, which should not present any obstacle in this case.

In choosing the basement option it is likely that Chetana would avoid having to apply for planning consent. However, one of the bedrooms would still need to double as her office, meaning that two of the children would need to share a room or one of the children sharing with Chetana’s office again.

Single-storey extension: For a more reasonable sum, approximately £50,000, Chetana could simply add a single-storey extension at the rear to create a living room opening on to the garden. To make this open-plan solution really seamless the kitchen and dining room should be swapped around. The living room on the first floor would then be released for use as another bedroom, which would create four bedrooms in total.

A “home-office-in-a-gorgeous-cupboard” concept could be employed for Chetana’s work requirements and located in the new communal living zone on the ground floor. Two of the children would still have to share a room, there would still be only one bathroom and planning permission and party wall agreements would still be required, but the cost would be much more in line with the current value of the property.

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