Please Help With a Difficult Layout

12 years ago

Hello all,

I am hoping that some of you amazingly helpful and knowledgeable people will be able to help my wife and I come up with the best design possible for our loooong awaited kitchen remodel. I will give as much detail here as I can, but please let me know if I forgot something important.

We are looking to do a complete gut and remodel of the kitchen, and plan to remove the wall between the kitchen and living room as well. This will open up the first floor tremendously, which we have always wanted to do, but it also takes away a lot of our current storage space, which is already woefully inadequate. We are wide open to possibilities since nothing will remain from the old kitchen.

It is just the two of us, and we are both love to cook, and do so frequently, so it's important to have the space for two of us to work at the same time comfortably. We are also the "go to" house for every holiday under the sun, so we are frequently hosting 8 to 15 people on those occasions, and it seems that everyone wants to help in the same corner of the kitchen where I am attempting to work! :-)

We have a lot of stuff...pots, pans, appliances, cookbooks, gadgets, etc. My wife works P/T for Williams Sonoma and we definitely take advantage of the discounts afforded to her! That being said, storage is a huge priority for us.

The kitchen really is the social hub of the house, so we would like the space for our guests to hang out and chat, or even have their own space to help out when they want. Most of our gatherings are informal, we almost never do any formal entertaining. However, we do have a large formal dining room off the kitchen which is where all of our larger event meals are enjoyed.

We are very flexible with our design options. We are OK moving walls or doors, taking out the window over the sink is fine too. The plumbing and electric can move anywhere they need to.

The only thing I think we have decided on are the appliances, which will be:
* a counter depth 84" high refrigerator
* 36" induction cooktop
* double wall ovens
* microwave drawer
* dishwasher

I have attached our current layout of the kitchen and surrounding rooms, drawn to scale, each box = 1'. Please ask me for any clarifications.

This is really an overwhelming process, and we really could use some help and suggestions.

Thanks!!

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Comments (8)

christina222_gw
12 years ago
Is there a slider in the dining room also? What is on the outside there? At a glance I'd say lose that slider in the kitchen, center the window and make it bigger. Use the whole back wall and possibly the one where the table was, add an island, open up access to the dining room.

I'm sure some of the very talented designers here will come up with some good ideas for you.
christina222_gw
12 years ago
My second thought on looking at this is how committed are you to that gigantic dining room? You could swap the kitchen and dining room areas. It'd give you more room to play with. In the (former) kitchen area you could put some nice French doors to the outside in the new dining room and also a set in the new kitchen. Assuming that opening goes to the outside.
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juliekcmo
12 years ago
I agree with Christina.
PRO
Michael DeCristofaro
Original Author
12 years ago
Christina, thanks for the input!

Unfortunately, the opening at the top of the dining room leads into a another room. It's like a library/den that was an extension to the original house, so the only way to access the back patio is out the sliding glass doors from the kitchen. Otherwise, I like your idea.

Please keep the ideas/layouts coming!
colleenoz
12 years ago
My first thought was to swap the kitchen and dining room as well. So what if you access the library/den through the kitchen? Since it's just the two of you it's unlikely you'll have a crowd constantly traipsing through to access that room.
Leave the slider as it is and then you will have one large entertainment area with access to the back patio, an ideal situation I would have thought.
Leave the opening from the kitchen into the dining room as it is and depending on how you feel about access you could close off the opening from the living room into the dining room or not, or make it smaller and less inviting while adding a little wall space for storage/appliances/whatever.
PRO
Michael DeCristofaro
Original Author
12 years ago
Well, you definitely got me thinking about the possibility of swapping the rooms, but I think that will make it a much larger and more difficult renovation, and considerably more costly as well. The dining room portion of the house was an extension put on many years back, so there is no basement below it to make running plumbing and electric easy. I think our best bet is to keep the remodel to the current location and even have it spill over slightly into the living room area once the wall is down.

Any ideas on how to best utilize the space where the kitchen is now once the dividing wall is down.

Thanks!!
debrak2008
12 years ago
Access to the back yard doesn't have to be a slider. Get a single glass door instead and have more useable wall space.
PRO
Michael DeCristofaro
Original Author
12 years ago
A smaller door is definitely a possibility.

Thanks!

This post was edited by mikedcusa on Tue, Jul 1, 14 at 21:53