Pictures of our existing kitchen:

Can you show us a diagram of all these spaces with just the exterior and supporting walls? Looks to me as though a complete rearrangement of spaces is called for here.

Show us the whole floorplan, including garage and any other rooms.

And please point out which is the door from the outside.

Here is our house layout with all of the "easy" to remove walls gone.

And here it is with all of the walls gone (chimney is gone as well, but we really can not move that).

We can also move the side door a few feet, it has to move anyways because it is about 6" lower that the other floors in the house.

The office area is also lower than the rest of the house - and has hard wood floors. Actually, the whole house has hard wood floors, with the dining room/hall being white oak, the kitchen/living room red oak (and perpendicular to the dining room) and the office has white oak, which are again 3" lower than the rest of the house. We can not justify reflooring the entire house, nor is it really an option to remove the flooring then put it back down. There are so many nails it's just too much to do any more than a small patch that way.

The pink walls are load bearing. We're ok with removing one of them, but don't really want to remove both. We are also trying to put together a plan that can be done in stages. Thanks for your input!

Oh, and here is the whole house as is.

Burn the house down and start over fresh with the insurance money. What you are proposing will cost more than the house cost originally.

Sophie - What I am proposing is in my original post; I have no desire to remove all the walls, I supplied those drawings because someone asked for them. I'm a P.E. so from an engineering perspective I know what's possible and what's practical. For the design in my original post, we would hire someone to install again the load bearing beam, remove the fireplace through the roof line and install new countertops. Everything else we can do ourselves. I'd just like ideas on the layout to see if there is a better way to work within our constraints.

My first thought persists. The current DR would be my LR. The current LR would be a 'hearth room'/dining area.

I'd try to create at least some feeling of an entry by the front door as you step into the house.

Is there a Family Entrance? It's off the garage in most homes, and some sort of 'back hall'/laundry area is appropriate there.

Is there a better 'view' on one side of the house or the other? The house seems short on windows -- or maybe we aren't seeing all of them?

I am with chisue on this. Make the dining room the living room, keeping the fireplace, then spend the time to reconfigure the dining room and kitchen.

Diane

The house is definitely short on Windows, we will slowly be remedying that. The main reason we have the living room in the back of the house is because of the cathedral ceilings. Plus the previous owners put in custom cherry built ins. My concern with switching the living and dining rooms is that I don't really get extra space because of the traffic patterns. Right now the front door is the "family" entrance because the configuration of tHe side door makes it useless.

plus, I still hate the kitchen layout. If you're at the stove, people can't get in my he fridge; there's little convenient counter space ; and there is no stove exhaust fan; and when you walk in the house you see right into the kitchen.

Maybe you should pull some of those cabinets out of your living room and make the windows bigger on that wall.

Depending on how often you invite people over for dinner, you might also consider only having a single table for eating. You could have a table in your living room both for ordinary eating and for dining. That would open up the dining room space for something else, since your current dining room appears very big.

What I have to say is that looking at your current floor plan, it appears the office was originally designed to be the living room, and your living room was originally designed to be the 'family room', intended to contain a small table for ordinary eating. I really do not understand why your dining room was built so big (or at least I have never seen a dining room so big in proportion to the other rooms. I suspect it used to be smaller but someone had the room expanded in the past.

The living room is an addition at some point, so the original house had the living room at the front. Parker, you are right that at one point the office was the living room, but my husband works at home so we needed a dedicated space for that.

Square footage wise, the dining room is the largest room in the house. But it also has the front door (the only entrance we use), the door to the hall leading to the bedrooms and bathroom, the door to the kitchen and the door to the office. Once you account for walkways, it has considerably less useable space.

My biggest complaint though is how the kitchen is situated. The one picture looking into the kitchen through the pass through is the view from the front door. I don't keep the neatest kitchen and I hate walking in the door and seeing the kitchen

Wall up the pass-though. Use the present DR as more formal LR. Recess the front entry closet into the Office and create some semblance of Foyer -- half wall dividing it from the living area, tile floor, lowered ceiling over that part of the room -- whatever to set it apart.

Use your cathedral-ceilinged room as kitchen/family living/dining. Remove the center portion of the bookcases and install windows, doors, whatever -- to bring in light, even if the view isn't wonderful.

I'd push a more compact working kitchen to the back of this room to allow space near the side entrance for a small hall with closet.

Chisue - thanks for the suggestions. We don't have much interest in having a family room and living room, especially considering how close the rooms would be. We'd rather have a larger living room and larger kitchen.

we do have nice views out if the living room that we are hoping to put in new windows eventually