The photo you link to is private.

Oops! The link should be public now. If anyone has any tips as to how to embed the plans into my message, I'll do that. I tried tussled with the computer, but alas, the computer won.

Here is a link that might be useful: Study B & C

Thank you, plllog! Plan C has the laundry door where the oven is located and the pantry door connecting from the laundry. If anyone has any thoughts on the layout, I'd LOVE the help. :)

I don't like the plan. It's not horrible, but its not very good. It's just my personal opinion.

A few general statements about the house - mostly so I can stop worrying about them.
--- Look for a laundry area upstairs. Since you only have a guest bedroom on the first floor, it'd be a whole lot nicer to have the laundry closer to the bedrooms. I know some people want the laundry there because they spend a lot of time in the kitchen, but the cycle times of newer laundry machines are fairly long and I could cook a complete dinner in the cycle time. Plus, I'd rather not be hauling clothes up and down stairs.
--- The powder room is in a slightly odd location. It might be better off being located off the mudroom and be the family bath with the hall bath taking the role of powder room.
---Fireplace location depends on whether you want to focus everyone on the same wall or whether you want to shift focus by time of day. I guess a secondary consideration is how connected you want to be to what's going on in the family room and how many people sit with their backs to the kitchen.

OK, now for kitchen.

The cleanup area isn't very close to the dining room and is somewhat of a walk to dish storage in either plan. In study B, it might be a mighty long walk. So when you entertain, you haul dishes to the dining room from ... and when you do clean up every single dish will cross through the cooking area.

Is there a place to function as a bar when you entertain? Is there a place close to the dishes and ref for a kid to catch a juice? Make popcorn? Make a sandwich? Where's the coffee?

Will it get on your nerves to be constantly circling the peninsula to fetch things to and from the informal dining area?

Are you the type to go shopping in your own pantry? Do you get out everything you need at once - or only half of it, making multiple trips around to get stuff. If you're like me and you make multiple trips gasp! Think about creating a mini pantry in the kitchen proper.

Either B or C has nice cooking space, but I'm thinking the placement of the ref, the prep sink, the micro and the dishes will lead people to invade your cooking space.

My suggestion is that you prioritize what you want (Two Cook Together, Kids Cook, The Entertainment Committee, Small family dinner, It's Breakfast time). I don't feel I could make any helpful suggestions - not because its impossible - but I don't know enough about you, what you want and what you like.

Bmorepanic - thank you so much for your comments. It is really helpful to think all of these issues out and you gave us lots to think about.

I am thinking about putting a wine refrigerator and microwave in the butler's pantry. My hope is that guests and snackers can get something out of the refrigerator, use the microwave, and grab a drink without actually cross the cooking space. I hadn't thought about a bar area, but I'll add that to the list too.

You made me laugh with your pantry shopping comment. I wish I was organized enough to gather everything I need at once. The reality is that I'll make multiple trips. We haven't designed the 2nd story yet, but maybe if there is room we can move the laundry upstairs. That may cut out a few steps from cooking area to pantry. I love your mini pantry idea.

All in all, you really helped me run through some mental exercises for what problems I'll encounter as I move around the kitchen. Thanks!

My grandmother's test for a house plan is "how many steps do I have to take with full grocery bags in my hands?" She always wanted the fewest possible steps.

If you have to trip your way through kids' shoes, backpacks, etc., in the mudroom (which is really more a hallway in your plan) then bringing the groceries in can be a chore, especially if you have to turn left and then right to get to a landing spot for the groceries in the kitchen.

With that in mind, you might consider moving the door from the garage into the house left, so that the hallway runs from the top left corner of the garage straight into the kitchen. Put the mud room off to the right side, and the pantry off to the left. The laundry room can go where the mud room is in study B, or you could move the powder room down to that spot and put in a drinks fridge and bar where the powder room is (facing into the family room area).

It might help, as you are thinking about whether to keep a big pantry area, to chunk out what will go in the pantry. I'll give you a sense of our "chunks" of storage and how they work in our kitchen, but you really need to customize this to how you live. (For most people, for instance, the idea of a coffee maker only getting used once a week is exceedingly strange....)

We have a much smaller kitchen, so we keep less used appliances and pans (like the crockpot, fondue set, and turkey roaster) out in the garage. We also store our cases of drinks, extra paper towel rolls, napkins, and other things we buy in bulk out in the garage.

In the kitchen, we have one corner cabinet that has all our baking items (flour, sugar, cooking chocolate, icing tips, muffin pans, etc) all in one place. It's near our oven.

We have a set of rollout shelves in a lower cabinet that hold all our canned goods (different kinds of soup stock, and tomato stuff, mostly, for making spaghetti and other sauces) and all our boxes of pasta, rice, etc.

We have two rollout shelves that hold all our plastic bags and tupperware containers, along with my daughter's lunchbox. One rollout up is the snack shelf, which contains anything she's allowed to help herself to. (Extra special cookies and cordials go up high where she can't reach them as easily.)

Another rollout contains cereal boxes and dog food (I know, weird to keep them together, but we didn't have enough space for a dedicated dog feeding station!)

Above that, we have appliances we use about once a week (waffle maker, coffeemaker, ice cream maker) plus grill tools (because that cabinet is right by the back door headed out to the grill).

All this is to say, you don't have to put all that stuff in one big pantry in your kitchen, even though you can if you want (it seems like you'll have plenty of square footage). Instead, think about how to distribute storage throughout your kitchen so that it'll be near where you want to use it.

Have fun with the planning process -- it's great to have a chance to make a kitchen that really works with how you want to live!

Eastbaymom - more really good advice. How about moving the laundry upstairs and using the laundry space as the pantry? We could even have two entrances to the pantry...one from the mudroom (as in Study B) and one from the kitchen (as in Study C).

You are right that the pantry is huge. That's because 1# on DH's wish list is a huge pantry. He is a fantastic cook and has all sorts of cooking stuff that he wants to store in the pantry. I think an oversized pantry is right for us because he has the storage he needs nearby, but I don't have obscure cooking utensils filling up my cabinets. But you all are right, location and access is key.

I love the idea of distributed storage throughout the kitchen. A mini pantry, snack stash, coffee center etc should really help cut down on having to traverse from one side of the kitchen to the other to get necessities.

Thanks so much for your comments. Your advice is really helping to improve our layout.

P.S. Eastbaymom - are you by chance located in Northern California's east bay area? That's where I grew up. :)