Personally, I don't know why there has to be a phone in the kitchen. There's always a bunch of clutter - calendars, phone books, pens, pencils, notes, to do lists ... If I were building my house, I would seriously think the phone thing through.
My other bugaboo about phones are those second and third phones that come with the one that must be in the phone jack. The extensions have to be plugged into an electrical outlet. Why don't they make the cradles to plug directly into the outlet like a night light, eliminating the cords. They could be plugged into a bath outlet, or be out of the way in the kitchen.
Anyway, here's mine in the kitchen.
{{!gwi}}

Ours is a cordless handset (the base unit is on our computer desk in another room), and is on our msg ctr:

My DH took the phone jack out of our kitchen during the remodel. As Annie said, there doesn't need to be phone in there (unless you want one of course), especially if you have a cordless.

I have a buffet counter when you first walk into the kitchen. We had them drill a hole for a gromet that the phone cord goes thru, down to an extra electrical outlet that is behind one of the drawers. You can see it on the top left of the first pic.

My daughter made a wisecrack when our kitchen was being put in, because at the time I was adamant about keeping my old wall phone. I was pretty headstrong about it because that phone was over 24 years old and was still working well. I heard my GC say something to his worker that he wasn't sure the wall phone was going to fit under the cabinet now. (We left the phone outlet where it was, but there had never been a cabinet there before.)

Well, he was right - it didn't fit. I now have a very small black and silver phone that sits on the counter and plugs into the wall jack.

My irritation with today's cordless phones is that most sets only come with the ability to handle 3 or 4 extensions. Also, you spent $500 on a console that uses your phone jack and 3 or 4 extensions, and if one of those extension phones dies, they've already replaced it. Another thought about those is that you're stuck in an electric outage if you don't have a regular phone. We now have phones that connect to the wall jacks in 4 rooms, the cordless main station, and 3 cordless extensions in 3 other rooms. (The only rooms in our house without phones are the bathrooms and the garage. The latter used to have one - doesn't any more for about three different reasons.)

DonnaR/CA

Donnar57: You're right about the electrical outage issue. I have the one in the kitchen for that reason. We also have one that is in our storage room that can be hooked up quickly in the event of a power outage.
I remember when my grandfather would not allow the phone into the house because he considered it a huge invasion of privacy. That crank phone was on the back porch! I remember as a little girl (a very little girl) trying to reach the phone to answer it. I can't imagine what he would think today with everyone walking around with a phone in their ear, pocket or purse!

Donna~ Did you mean to type $50? If not, what brand of phones are you buying?!?! Also, there is a set that the main unit (the one that uses the phone jack) is corded & the rest are cordless & only use outlet... That may be an option for your power outage concern. We just keep an old crappy corded phone around for those times & only plug it in when it's needed.

In our current house, we have a desk in the kitchen that the phone sets on. Also have one on the comp. desk, in the dining room & one in the bdrm. In our house we're fixing up, there is a message center type thing where the phone will set.

Dian~ I see what your problem is... I wouldn't like a phone hung in the middle of a wall either. Could you possibly get a desk phone & a long cord & just hide the cord behind something so you could place the phone where you want it?

We will have our telephone on top of a counter-height buffet that will be 60 inches wide by 15 inches deep; the buffet will occupy a short perimeter wall halfway between our kitchen core and our sunroom. Part of the cabinetry beneath the countertop will be a bank of four 36-inch drawers; although shallow (interiors barely 3 inches high and 11 inches deep) three of these long drawers should be sufficient to hold our "desk stuff", so the buffet will serve as a stand-up desk and message center. (The deeper bottom drawer will hold our dog's "stuff"!)

We were just talking about this today. I plan to banish our phone to the study. No way do I want it cluttering up our beautiful granite.

Hubby suggested the living room but I don't even want it there. Of course, in our case the land line is used solely for fax transmittal / receipt and occasional outgoing phone calls. Most of the time Hubby and I use our cell phones.

{{!gwi}}

Mysterymachine, your granite is giving me heart palpatations! Wowza, that is one GORGEOUS hunk of rock!

blackeyedpeas LOL thanks. You can see more pics on my finished thread unless you think they would be bad for your health. :)

On phones, yeah it covers up part of my granite LOL - but the placement is such that I can quickly get to it from either side of the peninsula so whether I am cooking or running to it from the TV room its an easy grab. Practicality takes precedence over beauty for most things in the kitchen. Having the cords etc under the granite in a semi-hidden cabinet is key.

Current house-- standard wall phone on the plate with the little screwheads to slide it on to (that's the way they came 50 years ago). New (old) house that we're renovating: cordless on a multi-handset base station.

I'm so glad I asked this question. It never occurred to me to put the base station in another room and just have a small cordless satellite in the kitchen. I just naturally expected the main phone to be on the kitchen wall--as if the Bell Telephone installers were decorators.

What an Ah-HA moment!

Does anyone else have pictures of phone placement?

Dianne

We put ours in our appliance garage that was installed last week. So far, we love it.

We keep both our remote phone base here, as well as our wall phone (in case we can't locate any of the 3 handsets when the phone is ringing - LOL. The handset goes into the garage to recharge overnight.

i got rid of my wall phone jack when i did the remodel, also. my plan is to just bring in the cordless phone from the living room if i need it. back up plan, if i want one there regularly, is to use a satellite phone; i have space on a counter right by an outlet.

Okay here is my layout.
Before- it was on wall between the outlet and the stove; yep, hung on the those little screws on the plate. yuck!
After- If I need a handset there all the time, as mentioned above, there is some room out of the way on the other side of the toaster.

We ditched the phone in the kitchen as we are always talking on the cordless and walk around w/it. We did have a phone jack (and cable) put inside a cabinet but we are not using it.

I insist that we keep a standard phone that will plug directly into the phone line in case of an outage, but DH doesn't like it, so we keep it in the emergency drawer with our flashlights etc. to plug in if needed. :-)

When we redo the kitchen, I'll be moving the main phone with the message machine to the family room, where we have our office built ins, and just keep a cordless auxiliary phone in the kitchen.

Who has a regular phone anymore? All cell is much cheaper and has better service. I understand if you're in a remote location without cell service, but with the unlimited talk time between members of the same carrier and the ability to make your land line number into a cell phone number, and the fact that your phone service costs all of $10 for that "house" line, why not go all cell? We've been all cell for 5 years and don't miss a land line at all.

Live wire oak -- we have rolling blackouts every summer and I am notorious for forgetting to charge my cell. A regular landline phone that does not require electricity to operator or charge is very important IMO. The new technologies all have the same downfall -- if your battery is dead, so is your phone. I have never lived any place that didn't have some weather related risk: flooding, earthquakes, rolling blackouts, tornadoes, snowstorms, monsoons, etc. I think that it's wise to keep a regular landline for emergencies even if you use your cell for everyday.

We deal with semi regular power outages here as well. It's one of the reasons we bought a generator. :~) The local power and light company may lose their gerbil on a wheel, but the power of Honda never fails.

I was going to say that my $6 land line phone from Target worked just fine, but then you got me thinking. Now that I've got that gas tankless water heater that needs electricity for the control panel, a generator probably wouldn't be a bad investment. DH is going to love that I've got yet another improvement to invest in...

Where'd you get the generator?

Can anybody recommed a kitchen cordless? I just bring my cordless in when it's needed and set it on the counter. Right now the base station is nearby in the living room but will move to the mudroom when we get finished with its reno. The mw interferes with my current cordless--wrong frequency I guess (and the cordless interferes with the wireless internet.)

bumping .... to keep this thread alive for awhile.

When we moved in (2002), I paid over $900 for a Siemens base station phone with eight cordless phones. It had lots of bells and whistles but one big problem: the reception in several of the remote rooms was terrible. Turns out that the 36 miles of wiring in our house for all the "smart house" features interfered with the transmission from the base station. We ultimately purchased several additional cordless phones...each was under $20. Live and learn...

Bob

I like having a phone in the kitchen because I can listen to messages when I get home -- while putting away groceries, fixing the kids a snack, or getting dinner started. We spend so much time in the kitchen that I couldn't imagine not having one in there. But I love the idea of hiding the jack and outlet inside a cabinet and will design that in to the new kitchen.

As for dumping the land line...I don't mind carrying my cell phone with me because it almost never rings. If our main family phone number was on my cell, it would ring all day and that would annoy me. The important people have my cell #, and they rarely use it, which suits me. We don't have long distance on our land line, though -- we use our cells for that, or a prepaid phone card (we have the number and PIN on speed dial).

OT and maybe TMI for some...Re: generators...We have a corded phone in our laundry room, really great for power outages. Only once in the last 15 years have we had an outage that lasted more than a few hours, so we have never bothered w/ a generator. That one time, when the power was out for a few days and I absolutely needed electricity (to power a breastpump every 2 hours during/after tropical storm Isabel -- 4 days post-partum!), we ran an extension cord out to my husband's car and used an inverter. Worked fine.

Update: my DH, with all good intentions and thinking he would surprise me, moved the phone jack from the kitchen to the living room while I was out with friends on Sunday. Lovely sentiment that I truly appreciate.

However, he moved it to the living room directly behind the previous location. Now the phone jack is hidden behind a shelf unit 48" from the floor and 24" from the corner on the living room wall. The phone itself sits on an endtable, which is fine.

I guess that shelf unit is staying put till we move or die. How can I explain to potential buyers why there's a phone jack in the middle of the living room wall?

Gotta love it.

I'm so glad this subject has been brought up! I have a wall jack on a blank wall in my kitchen for a hanging phone - only the wire doesn't plug into it, the wire is actually coming out of the jack and I plug my phone into it! It's about 6 inches long. Now that I am redoing my kitchen I was going to have the phone company come out and rewire it correctly, but why?? Now I'm moving it! why didn't I think to do that?? I have it on a small shelf now, but I don't know what I plan to do with the rest of the wall after redoing the kitchen, but I don't want to have to plan the whole wall around the bleep-ing phone jack!!

All my decisions are made, am getting ready to order cabinets, and something new to obsess over! :-)