Here are a couple of images of the space.

Make sure to match the wood floors. It definitely looks like you will have a much bigger living area from the new layout.

My only simple suggestion would be for swivel chairs in the front. I understand how you will miss your porch. Had to build one on my current house after previously having one. It is the best!

@steelgirl065 Good point about the swivel chairs. You had a porch previously and moved somewhere without a porch then built it? Once I close the porch here there's no way of going back, unfortunately. I'm really torn!! I only get to use it a few months of the year but it is nice.

Is it possible to keep the porch intact in front of the office, converting only the living room side?

And to add, I’ve enjoyed my unheated porch for 40 years,I couldn’t see giving it up.

They’re special places :).

What Kendrah said, as to having functional windows with screens- as looks like you have in current LR wall. And agree may work best if it can serve as additional seating but not the main “ TV seating “ sofa-chair group. Swivel chairs or easy to re- position chairs if don’t need to re- orient every day. One or 2 real houseplants , probably good- sized, suitable for the amount of sun.

How many more feet of useable space will you gain with this extension of your living room? How much will it cost? You are going to have install matching floors and ceilings - or remove and redo all of your ceiling and floor to include the new space. You are also going to have to figure out how to structurally deal with removing the front wall of your house. Have you gotten estimates for this work?

If you need more living room seating, I would instead consider widening the opening between your living room and the sitting area off of the kitchen and combining these two seating areas into one.

You have a load of great side tables, end tables, and low bookshelves in this space. But, I think they eat up usable seating space.

@HU-121436380 We are adding a small bath behind my husband's current office (other side of the porch) so we need that space. And it's not the nice side, unfortunately. They are special spaces - that's my dilemma. But up here my use of it is limited compared to hosting people inside. Tough!!

@Kendrah All good points, thank you so much. You've captured our thinking about this well!! We will gain space and light (about 5 feet deep across the front of the 12" wide room) and are thinking of going with furniture that faces the street but that we can turn when we have larger gatherings (not that often, but sometimes). We're getting estimates right now. We anticipate around 100K to enclose the porch, extrude the gable roof, match floors, plaster the ceiling, and got one quote around that amount. I thought about doing an oriel or box window I could sit in, but there'd be no airflow and I'd be on display in my busy urban setting.

If the prices come in too high to enclose the LR porch side, we'll remove the LR/DR wall. We'll probably strip the jalousies, put skylights in the roof portion over the porch, and remove the windows. I'll just use it when weather permits then. But my husband really wants the light and doesn't like using the porch, so we'll see! Big windows with good airflow/screens are our intention. Thanks again!!

@Lantern Visual Thank you so much! I appreciate your suggestions. :-)

Love your house! Beautiful rooms. Can you put a door casing with pocket doors where the living room windows are and turn the porch into a sunroom that is connected yet separate from the living room? I love my tiny sunroom that is opened to my living room because it can function as one room or separate rooms according to our needs.

this is my heated and insulated sunroom adjacent to my living room. It was build like this in 1920 but if i had added it I would have had a larger casing but still some separation.

These are actually “barn doors” because the house originally had doors that swung into the narrow sunroom and impeded furniture arrangement and adding pocket doors properly would have made the room even narrower. So we hid the barn door track to appear like pocket doors.

@roarah Thank you. Yours are beautiful too. We thought about this, but when we entertain we tend to be in a circle with people sometimes all engaging in an activity/sharing. So a pocket door type situation would make that hard. This is the plan we started working with at first. If costs come in too high we might go with that and drop the outdoor porch windows. And remove the LR/DR wall.

The porch will now become an addition and will require that same work as any addition it is not kust taking out a wall at least not where I live. As for outdoor feeling lots of windows maybe even a patio door to access outside and windows that give you a cross breeze all doable for 100K ??????

Thank you @Patricia Colwell Consulting. We just met with a contractor. Hope to have numbers next week. It could be quite a lot more than $100K. Final numbers will help the decision, I'm sure!

What about adding the new bathroom where the back porch is? That would enable you to keep the hall bath and front office. You could then just extend the living room and keep 1/2 of the front porch. I don’t know that making the primary bedroom bigger gets you much more as ling as you get the en suite.

I'm guessing your exterior wall was load bearing so whatever you're building the load is being transferred in some fashion. That doesn't appear on your plans.

How do you enter the house? I don't see a door to the exterior.

A porch with wrap around windows would provide you with that interior/exterior ambiance.

@lmckuin I proposed that to the architect and contractor but they were against it. They didn't want pipes on outside walls (there's an unenclosed porch under where we will enclose the second floor).

Part of the idea is that the new small bath could serve the front office and guest room more easily than walking through the living to the hall.

I mainly want a bigger bedroom to have more closet space (I have almost 9 feet of built-ins with the new plan). My husband wants to have more light in his office, which is why he'd like to be on the street. I'll play with the back bathroom idea, though.

@BeverlyFLADeziner Yes - that's what I would want in an ideal world. You enter the house from below the office next to the living room. Stairs come up between that room and the guest/office.

Beverly - we enter the house from the right door and walk up stairs to the second level. The living room is on the left facing the house.