I know exactly what you are going through! We've been doing the same thing for the past few months.

Your plan looks pretty nice, but I do have one thought about the kitchen. Your island blocks easy access from your stove and refrigerator to the sink. Perhaps you could put a small prep sink in your island.

Sandy

I forgot to mention, that I would like the basement stairs and mudroom to fit in without adding a lot of additional square footage to the house. I have the area dedicated to the furnace and water heater on the plan, that can be repurposed since that will all be in the basement.

There's lots to like in your plan.

I'd try to accommodate a full size fridge, not a counter depth. You could box that wall into the walk-in, then maybe do a shoe rack on the other side to make it look integrated.

A small island prep sink is a good idea.

Porch is very small. It'd be nice to bump the laundry/nook/Master wall out but I'm sure there's a reason the house is sized the way it is.

Around here, 10' is very high. 11' would feel cavernous to me but may be the norm in your area.

Double check your garage is large enough for your vehicles. Mine is 20x24 (albeit oriented the other way...garage door on the 20' wall) but I find is much too tight.

For a home of this size, I would think carefully about the need for 3 dining areas (formal dining, eating peninsula and breakfast nook). Neither space is really big enough to hold a large table.

Since the only windows in it will be shaded by the porch, the family room will not get a lot a light and you will probably have to turn the lights on in there even during the day. You might want to consider adding skylights in there.

I agree, pps7. We have no need for 3 separate eating areas. I think we might make both the kitchen and the dining room a little larger and eliminate the rear "nook."

We also thought about expanding the livingroom where the rear porch is, so that the basement stairs could go along the wall where the secondary bathroom is. The fireplace would be eliminated, and windows added to that wall. I made some crude changes to the above plan, but didn't post them, since they were grossly out of scale.

Thank you so much for your ideas. It has given us a lot to add to our list, and more of me sketching before we actually have it drafted by someone who knows what they are doing! :)

If that's your refrigerator next to your pantry, will you have enough clearance to open the fridge door(s) all the way?

I forecast TREMENDOUS traffic jams in your kitchen. The garage dumps traffic straight into the kitchen, and the kitchen island and eating round further complicate matters.

You definitely need some other way to direct traffic into the house rather than into the corner of the kitchen. If you do away with one of the eating areas, you might be able to work in a mudroom to relieve some pressure.

An idea: if you don't have a mud room, why don't you open the garage into the corner of the dining room? Then traffic could travel across the dining room instead of winding through the kitchen.

The eating round, when it has stools around it, will take up a whole lot of space. You won't be able to move around it, or open the door of the pantry. Could you combine the eating round and the nook somehow for casual dining? Maybe slide the whole kitchen area to the top of the plan? Then put a mud room between the dining room and the kitchen.

littlebug5 has made a good point. You will have people intersecting your work triangle while cooking, in particular, near your stove. You could have a huge safety issue, such as you are carrying a boiling pot of pasta over to drain it at the sink, and someone doesn't pay attention and runs into you.

I did that as a child, and was scalded with boiling chicken soup. My poor mother was beside herself over that, but it was just an accident. The stove was near our back door, and I ran in from outside at the wrong moment.

Wow! Thanks for all your replies! You have really given us a lot of good ideas. I worked on our plan this weekend...now I just need to get my changes made to scale and repost the new plans.

I personally hate double doors in areas that you want closed regularly - master bed and bath for example. They are usually more than twice as much work to close.

Have you lived with these before? They look all dramatic but what a pain. They also never seal as well as single doors.