New kitchen layout ideas - Please help :)

8 years ago

I'll start by saying I am not an architect nor a professional so please excuse my first attempt at providing our current kitchen layout. Our house is a 1950s ranch located in Southern California that was updated about 20ish years ago (we think.) This kitchen is fine, for now, but the longer we are here (18 months now) the more things we find about it that we dislike. It was upgraded, at the time, with nice appliances, floors etc. The cabinets have been painted white and are already chipping and cracking. The countertops are basic level Corian that I strongly dislike as they stain very easily. We have an electric cooktop with build-in downdraft that absolutely HAS to go. We have plenty of storage space but mostly we lack adequate continuous prep space. Because of the French doors into the kitchen, we are limited in how we can expand. Our plan is to keep the existing footprint to keep the existing plumbing but hopefully somehow carve out longer spaces of prep space. We are open to the idea of a range instead of the double ovens however ideally we'd keep two ovens so maybe a 48" range plus a single wall oven somewhere. I love the way an electric oven bakes but as I already mentioned, I don't love the electric cooktop. We are still scratching our heads wondering why they would spend so much money on a remodel and put in a $900 cooktop. Any and all suggestions and plans you can provide would be great! We'd like to add an island if possible but the space, while adequate, isn't huge so we are limited. I should add that behind the wall with the dishwasher/sink is our living room and that wall IS 100% load bearing. There is a beam that goes 3/4 of the way across the room. It ends about where the 29 inches of counter space are located. That wall is flanked with 4 cabinets above that space. Thank you!

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Comments (3)

futura431
Original Author
8 years ago
Here is a better to-scale illustration of the space. Hello? Anybody?
PNW Remodel
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Elevation views would help. We are planning on bumping our counters out 1 1/2 inches (the width of a 2 X 4) to add more counter depth. You could do that on one or more counters.

I would center the cooktop/range on the right wall, ditch the double oven, put a microwave drawer on the end of the inside leg of the "bar" facing the right. Roughly center the sink on the bottom wall depending on cabinet sizes, and move the DW to other side of sink. See if you can use a corner drain and add a larger garbage pull out under sink. You end up with 3 areas: 1 - food/fridge and quick cook area with MW, 2 -cooking area with range, and 3 - clean up area.

Double oven seems like it ruins the flow. Depends how important a double oven is; seems like over kill given the size of kitchen and cooktop. There are combi convection oven/microwaves speed ovens (such as Bosch and Miele) vs the double oven that can be used along with a range.

What is being stored in the bottom left corner of the "bar", how do you access it? Moving the sink and DW like noted may allow a corner cabinet to go in there.
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futura431
Original Author
8 years ago
@PNW Remodel Yes, I definitely agree about the double oven. Although we do use them at the same time all the time - I'd say 1-2X a week at least but they do ruin the flow and take up precious countertop space. We like having electric ovens honestly. We only have 18 inches to the left of the cooktop which is basically useless in terms of prep but it's good for cookbooks. By getting rid of the ovens we gain an additional 2-3 feet of countertop there which would be great. If we ditched the double oven we would want to get a duel fuel range with 2 ovens (or one that has an oven and a smaller one next to it.)

If you're facing the breakfast area, under the bar directly below the sink is the world's most narrow cabinet (seriously it's like 3 inches wide) and a set of 3 drawers that house linens, the infamous junk drawer, and a heavy duty drawer that holds our cast iron stuff. There's nothing to the right of that but on the end of the peninsula there is a cabinet that holds our cookbooks currently but I'm begging my husband to turn it into a trash can slide out. We'll buy one of those converter kits. Currently our trash can is at the end of the peninsula area (blocking that cabinet) and it also cuts into the [very narrow] walkway there to begin with. On the opposite side (under the bar stools) is one cabinet on the far far right almost in the living room. We store stuff there that we don't need to access a lot (crock pot, waffle iron etc.)