We bought 28 Lausanne Road in the autumn of 2006. Although the top of the house had been well renovated, the remainder of the house required a lot of work. Considering the existing form and structure and our limited budget, we decided that the most efficient way to extend would be to demolish the rear wall and construct a full width extension across the back to provide an open plan family room / kitchen with views to the garden. This form also created the opportunity for a courtyard that allowed us to retain the original window to the existing rear living room, and provided a view from this room all the way through the garden room and down the garden. The project includes open plan kitchen/living area with a trap door in the bedroom floor above that opens to create a double height space. A sky space roof light, a wood burning stove, external insulation and Siberian Larch cladding, a roof garden, solar water heating and second hand London Stock bricks. The second phase of this project, completed in 2017, added a full width rear dormer to create two mezzanine bedrooms for our two children. The house is located on a busy road and we were keen to relocate all bedrooms to the rear of the building, overlooking the large green area behind. To do this, we created two mezzanine bedrooms, with the sleeping areas overlooking the garden whilst the study areas below faced the main road. We installed secondary glazing to all front windows and included an acoustic layer beneath the new roof to reduce noise levels from the street. We also installed a ventilation system that pumps air into the front rooms supplying them with clean, fresh air from the garden.