Interior home re-design help

Hi Everyone,

We live in Dublin 12 in a two up-two down in Drimnagh & have a kitchen extension one third smaller than the maximum allowed without planning permission.

The thing is, the previous owners knocked through the front parlour room wall creating a two living rooms divided by a square archway which open again through double doors onto the kitchen - its great having the extra space for the galley kitchen but you walk through the middle of the three rooms to get from one to the other & for the life of me, now having a few bob to make a proper home out of it, I can`t figure out how to decorate it nicely as the design of the house is a bit nuts and none of the corners lend itself very well to a nice cosy living room, our kitchen is a bit small & we have two fireplaces & a redundant hallway opening onto the two halves of living room to try & sort out!
Would anyone have any advice as to whether to try & structural engineer or would an architect be better to approach in order to tackle the interior layout of the house ?

Any help would be well appreciated !

Would you not just put back up the wall between the parlour and the original kitchen? Bigger isn't always better, and at the moment it sounds like what have is one house-width hallway.

If you have a galley kitchen extension then you would have plenty of room to turn the original kitchen into a lovely dining-room-living-room combination, which would be a really sociable space and great for entertaining.

The Parlour could then be a dedicated room of its own - a TV room, an office, a guest room (it's just big enough for any of those)

Yeah I don`t think the structural changes needed to finish the open plan idea make financial sense as the fireplaces & some of the walls were apparently made from poured concrete moulds back in the 50`s. Thanks for the reply, it`s along the lines of what I was thinking!