Do you have a cellar or is it just a cupboard under the stairs?

And when you say loft you mean the first floor? Not the attic (if there is any)?

Hello Bernadette

Slightly different approach, so I may be way off beam here, but would it be totally out of the question to use the dining room as a kitchen/diner and the kitchen as a utility room?

How would you re-configure if you did a loft space? Move a bedroom up and use that for utility? Also what is under the stairs, could you have a micro utility in there? From personal experience I have found them to be invaluable in tight circumstances!

Hopefully you will find a solution quickly!

Is a small extension to the kitchen out of the question?

Do you have a budget in mind?

Perhaps the wall between the kitchen and dining is not load bearing in which case you wouldn't need a steel beam so it would be cheaper and if it's only a stud wall it would be cheaper to take down and dispose of than bricks? We had a brick wall between dining and kitchen, I thought it was load bearing even though the upstairs had a stud wall. When we pulled the whole lath and plaster ceiling down, the wall was not holding anything up, not even a joist was sitting on it.

Why would you not want to knock the wall out? The only way of gaining a utility room but no more room in the kitchen is to do this. However, you need to move doorways and then walk from the front door with shopping through the lounge the long way to the kitchen.

By knocking the wall down you can have a few layouts that might work:-

If you want all of the above i'd go with this:-