Oh, and for a little more context, here's a rough drawing of the first floor plan, the numbers here are estimates, so the scale is a touch off..

Would you be willing to change the layout of the first floor?

From one small house owner to another: I love Ikea, but spend some of your planning/budgeting time looking beyond Ikea, such as Barker Cabinets, the RTA store (Conestoga Cabinets) -- both have good reviews here -- and especially, a local cabinet maker who will make frameless cabs (I found mine by googling frameless cabinets/ my state) -- because you want to devote as little space to fillers as possible, and these others are more customizable yet still budget friendly. Also, google sliding shelves and pullout drawers and similar phrases to find online sellers of an incredible array of drawer, cabinet and filler inserts and fittings, again, to maximize the usefulness of your space. You can get great ideas even if you don't buy from them.

Since you are handy people you might also be able to cut down or inventively put together Ikea cabinets to fit your space better (for example, I cut down 2 Ikea drawers to fit in my odd sized pantry when I decided later that I wanted drawers on the high shelves)

I also had a low-sill window that had been covered up by a previous owner; I had a smaller one installed in the space and feel it was one of the better things I did for my remodel.

I'm all for DIY, but kitchens are complicated. So many factors to factor in a functional kitchen. I highly suggest getting a layout done by a Pro then installing yourself. It would be $ well spent to buy a layout plan.

I disagree with the above as I think you'll get better advice on layout from this forum than many pro's. Now there are exceptions to that, but I've seen so many pro plans being posted here and then the poster getting invaluable help from others on here to improve it further or completely re-design it to an even better plan.

Overall I think the plan is decent for the space you have. I would move the DW/sink down to have more space between the sink and stove though as that will be the space used most for prepping due to its proximity to both the stove and sink. The peninsula will likely be your secondary prep space or only used when you don't require the stove. Having the sink closer to it would help too for the purposes of secondary prep or non-stove prep, otherwise this is likely to happen over the dishwasher. Humans tend to automatically use the space that require the least amount of steps. Moving the sink will give you two good prep spaces in the kitchen.

I'm wondering about the short wall though that you show as load bearing on one side. Where does the beam go - across the kitchen to the peninsula wall or back along the fridge wall area? If across the kitchen to the peninsula wall then where is the load point on that wall? Or did you skip showing that wall difference I see in the actual pictures due to the layout program?

a cabinet's side touches a wall.

This is probably a symptom of the Ikea planner not running well on my computer, it made it impossible to line everything up just right, I'm just working on the general layout at the moment.

A differ depth cabinet touches another

If you're referring the the pantry cabinet and the cabinet over the fridge, that's intentional and I fully realize we'll have to do something to mount this but if I mount that one above the fridge further back I'm going to end up with a pile of junk on top of the fridge. That may end up being a custom thing I build myself and not an out-of-the-box Ikea cabinet.

Would you be willing to change the layout of the first floor?

Probably not, we're pretty happy with the flow of it as is, but what, generally, did you have in mind?

I'm all for DIY, but kitchens are complicated. So many factors to factor in a functional kitchen. I highly suggest getting a layout done by a Pro then installing yourself.

I appreciate the sentiment here but that's simply not going to happen. I bought a small house that had lots of room for updates because I enjoy doing these things myself. It's fun for me and I'm not going into the process blind. I know what I need out of a kitchen to make it functional for me and I'm not interested in spending money to have someone else do design work that I'm perfectly comfortable doing myself. Our family is full of professionals, several of whom have designed and built their homes themselves (including the kitchens) from the ground up. We're not amateur DIY'ers (we're in the middle of building a garage with our own two hands).

I love Ikea, but spend some of your planning/budgeting time looking beyond Ikea, such as Barker Cabinets, the RTA store (Conestoga Cabinets) -- both have good reviews here -- and especially, a local cabinet maker who will make frameless cabs

We'll definitely shop around - doing this is probably at least a year or two out), but I suspect anyone custom will be out of our price range, especially with all of the other things the house needs outside of the kitchen (we're building a 24x24 garage right now, deck, patio, and fence in the spring, upstairs is to be gutted, re-insulated and drywalled in the summer/fall, need to install heat on the second floor, furnace is old, etc.)

I may end up building all or some of the cabinet boxes myself, that's the level of DIY I'm talking about. :D

Ikea is a starting point and a backup since I'd love to build them myself but even raw lumber can be $$$ so Ikea may be more affordable. Once I have a layout settled on I'll price it out with Ikea cabs, and with building them myself, and go from there.

I would move the DW/sink down to have more space between the sink and stove though as that will be the space used most for prepping due to its proximity to both the stove and sink. The peninsula will likely be your secondary prep space or only used when you don't require the stove

In our current kitchen, I actually do most of my prep on the peninsula (even when doing lots on the stove) and then move things to the stove when they're ready to go on the heat, and with the way I cook, having the sink closer to the peninsula will mean less time spend near the stove. I'm very messy with my prep and tend to spread out and generally my husband will come in behind and clean up the prep mess while I'm working at the stove. I'm also trying to avoid crowding the peninsula when the dishwasher is open, I'll try a version with the sink bumped down a little bit and see though! I think I'd have to loose that open shelf for my mixing bowls and such, though. There's not room in the dining area to push the peninsula any further down.

I'm wondering about the short wall though that you show as load bearing on one side. Where does the beam go - across the kitchen to the peninsula wall or back along the fridge wall area? If across the kitchen to the peninsula wall then where is the load point on that wall?

That short wall used to be the exterior wall of the house and there's a beam that connects it to the exterior sink wall - I'm operating under the assumption it is due to that, and just shortened it in my post to simply saying it's load bearing cuz either way we don't want to do the kind of structural work it would take to find out and/or remove it. The main beam of the house inside runs directly beneath it and the wall dividing the livingroom and front parlor on the other half of the house.

I'm interested to see how your kitchen progresses. Also-the Ikea planner thing made me want to throw my computer out the window. Surprised I wasn't hoarse from yelling at it. TURN! NO! TURN I SAID! no no no quit turning toward the wall argh!

I think if I were you I'd use graph paper to work on the plan instead of trying to get the planner to work. It is also easier to read dimensions for others who may want to play around with your kitchen if you post an empty plan.

It looks to me like you'd also be able to fit an island into your kitchen instead of a peninsula if you were so inclined (I know to many this is an important element).

The drawback with an island is you wouldn't have the continuous space between the sink and the prep area and for the triangle to be better you'd want to move the fridge to the window side to not have a barrier island. Not sure an island would be my first choice as what you have now will be more open looking when in the kitchen than the island, but wanted to throw that idea out.

Another idea is to shrink the floor space slightly inside the kitchen and make the peninsula a little wider and put the sink in the peninsula and have the long prep counter along the window wall. Or you could do that and have a little deeper counter without moving things. You could use upper cabinets on the dining side of the peninsula to get more storage with the little you loose by shrinking the floor space.

What a nice, though small home. I love the quirkiness of older ones, so nice not to know before even walking in the door exactly what spaces will be behind it, no mystery at all. Wonderful opportunities to create special spaces and looks that can't be created anywhere else. Lucky you. :)

So. There will be only 3 (probably) ) of you plus plenty of friends and family come to chat and dine. You like to cook, which suggests you like to eat your cooking.

My earnest advice is to create your dining space/spaces as ardently as you do your kitchen. That space open to the kitchen is hugely important. Because of that peninsula, anyone sitting out there will not be able to see much that's going on in the kitchen, and I'm guessing no one over the age of 6, who's been told to, is going to want to sit there there before they have to. Certainly not on a bench. They'll all be standing around instead. Is there any other option? That precious space should be inviting at all times.

I agree you can get all the advice you need to design a great kitchen here, but among it will be constant suggestions to just push this and that out, take away here and there, to get the kitchen fancied by people who don't have to live in the leftover space. Be careful! Budget all your spaces to work very well for you and stick to it.

Regarding that "unfinishable" basement, are you sure even just the area at the bottom of the steps wasn't always just waiting its chance to be a treasured little extra kitchen storage/pantry? I have good in-kitchen storage, and a wonderful spacious one in our basement that I love, and if at all possible highly recommend considering one as an extension of your kitchen. You may not be able to get a freezer down there, but....could you? You might be able to save money on cabinets to finish it.

I'll never have another lazy susan, btw. My choice is now running fantastically efficient drawers or other cabinets right to the corner space If the corner's accessible from another side, fine, otherwise a happy sacrifice. I did that in this very basic vacation home kitchen and have never regretted it for a second.

What’s the plan for that small counter to the left of your fridge? It would totally be a junk collector for me, so you may want to consider a shallow pantry on that side. It would look nice and balanced, and give you a bit more storage... something that always seems to be lacking in a small house. :)

I would also consider moving your trash pullout to the left of your range... I feel like it would be more useful in your prep area. And I would probably move my dish storage to under-cabinet drawers in the peninsula, so it’s closer to both your eating area and dishwasher... no point in lugging things over to the opposite side of the room if you don’t need to.

I’d move the sink down a bit to give you a little more room for prep, and I would move the mixing bowls over to the right side of the sink, so they’re by your prep area instead of your cleanup area.

Do you have a link to your Ikea layout? If you email it to yourself, you can copy/paste it here... that way we aren’t starting from scratch.