A bathroom and closet(s) on the first floor would be a must have for me.

Overall, a nice little house. You'll have great cross-ventilation and natural light from those windows.

I like the idea of shrinking the study and enlarging the living room. I can only assume you'd live like we do . . . but I agree with Mrs. B that it'd be better to have one nice, big space where people could gather . . . and then the study would be a smaller, cozier space for one person to be alone. Alone to read, watch a TV show that no one else wants to share, etc.

Along with that thought, I would eliminate the French doors between the living room and study. First, losing that door will help with furniture placement in both rooms -- it'll give you more wall area, which I think you'll appreciate. Second, it'll enforce the idea of the study as the quiet, alone spot. I would absolutely keep the French doors to the hallway because that'll allow you to have acoustical privacy, and it'll keep future little fingers out of your office items. However, I'd consider going with the pocket French doors -- doing away with the "swing" is just so convenient.

On the subject of doors, I think I'd do away with the French doors between the kitchen and the dining room. I see no point in them -- the dining room would still be open on the other side. It looks like an expense for something that'd never really be used.

I also think I'd lose that little do-di-do bit of wall dividing the back hallway from the living room. Without that little bit of wall, you'll have a longer living room. It'll give you the option of expanding your furniture placement dooooown towards the kitchen . . . or pulling the furniture in close to the fire place. The back area can still "read" as a hallway, but you'll have more flexibility if you don't have that bit of wall.

In the kitchen, is that a small cabinet over in the corner by itself? I think I'd make that into a small pantry -- I'd enlarge it just a bit. You have plenty of cabinet space, but nothing gives as much storage space as a pantry, and a pantry is also cheaper than cabinetry.

Your walkways in the kitchen look fairly minimal.

Your dining room looks to be a nice-size, but its dimensions will restrict you in terms of furniture: If you have a china cabinet, it'll need to be a small corner cabinet, and your table will have to be round.

Have you seen a bath-under-the-stairs in person? It's possible, but it's tiny.

I don't think you have the room to do everything you would like to do with the current plan.

I think you will have to give up some of the complete symmetry of the hall to make the powder room bigger and to get in a closet. There could be a bench at the end of the powder room wall and the passage to the hall could be a deep arched opening. I would also use pocket doors between the LR and Den, and to the powder room, and use a smaller door into the Den. You have a large number of openings and that will severely restrict furniture placement.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I'd like to keep the study about the size it is now - my husband would need to meet semi-regularly there with small groups of people. Point taken, though, about too many large openings and not enough closet space - so I've closed off the door between the living and the study and replaced it with a (crudely drawn) closet.

I also reconsidered the size of the living room, which did seem small. Since expanding into the study isn't an option I pushed the fireplace wall out to create an extra, inglenook sort of area. I also made the entrance to the study a single width pocket door and moved the stairs a bit closer to the front door to create an uninterrupted living room wall space.

That small corner cabinet in the kitchen was representing a pantry... I made it slightly larger per your suggestion, MrsPete :)

The living room is much improved. It's still small, but it's better than it was.

I just don't think that kitchen will work well. The island and seating just looks like it takes up WAY too much space. I agree that it's a valuable feature and I would like to have one, too, especially with kids. But I just don't think it's workable as drawn.

Draw in some stick people and a couple of stick kids and a stick baby in a walker, all in the kitchen, and see how much room there is to move around.

If you put closets in the study as pictured, you will effectively reduce its size by almost the same amount I did, and they won't really be accessible where you need them.

Also you won't be able to fit a currently code-compliant powder room completely under the stairs, it's just not possible anymore to my knowledge, because the headroom drops too quickly with 8 foot ceilings, and the complete run isn't shown for 8' if it's drawn accurately--there should be 13-14 treads I think.

I agree, I think the kitchen is too tight. It's going to function like a racetrack. The footprint of the house is small enough that I'm wondering if you can have an eat-in kitchen And a formal dining room closed off from each other. Remember that a foursquare-type center hall house of this size would not really have had an eat-in kitchen except maybe a smallish table in the middle that could be moved around.

I love a big island as much as the next person but as others have mentioned, the kitchen is way too small to accommodate one that size. Definitely consider shrinking that as well or widening the entire kitchen.

It's been irking me that there's no proper landing place for bags/shoes etc. coming in from the (detached and not pictured) garage. What I've done, essentially, is lengthen the whole house by about five feet. This created space between the kitchen and dining for a side entry with space for a bench/coat hooks etc., and also for a proper powder room. I cut a bit into the dining room which makes it smaller but brings it to more conventional dimensions. On the other side of the house this allowed me to bring the study back to its original dimensions while keeping the closet, and also give the living room an extra bumped out seating area. I did not change the kitchen dimensions, but I made the island slightly less ambitious.

Thoughts?

This post was edited by davis.mbd on Sat, Sep 27, 14 at 0:15

You're not going to seat 5 at that island. plan on 30" per seat. You will need 10' to seat 4 in a row. Not going to happen in a 14' wide kitchen.

Since you won't have an eat in kitchen, you will be eating all your family meals in the dining room. So it makes sense to have the rooms open to each other.

Will you have a basement? If so, it would make sense to stack the stairs. Which means you cannot tuck a powder room or a closet under the stairs. If your building on slab, I'd consider switching the direction of the stairs - have the stairs leading up from the kitchen/living room side. Unless you plan an architectural staircase, having the view of the stairs from the front door can be odd. Especially since you stairs seem to be half way in front of your door.

Lastly, for such a small plan, you do seem to be wasting a lot of space on the center hallway. I have a very similar center entrance Colonial. The left side of my stairs form the wall of my dining room and kitchen. So I only need to deal with one aisle of traffic. With your plan you have to plan the traffic pattern thru dining room to kitchen, as well as the traffic pattern thru hallway to kitchen or living room.

Well... I've made some pretty drastic changes, as you can see below. Other than the obvious layout swaps, I've pretty much decided to eat my own words and shrink down the study to allocation more square footage to the living room. Also a comment up above inspired me to try a six-top kitchen table rather than an island - and I just like tables so much better anyway. I'm guessing though, that there's probably not enough room? It just seems like such a nice idea. That's a window seat in the dining room. Overall I feel much better with this than any of my prior iterations - I'm especially pleased with the private side entry that can be closed off from the rest of the house. I'm excited to hear what y'all think!

I would find the kitchen too cramped with that table and cabinets on both sides, especially once you consider refrigerator access and folks working at the sink. I would suggest 16' and move the refrigerator.

Might you be at all interested in something like the plan linked below? You could eliminate a bunch of fireplaces and the upstairs porch.

Good luck!

Here is a link that might be useful: house plan

With the rearranged kitchen, now you have to walk around the table to go from refrigerator to sink. Your table needs to be at least 5' to get 2 people per side. And you need a minimum of 2-1/2' around for chairs. So your table is still taking up 10' of space. Anytime you want to open the oven door, you will need to have somebody move from the table.

You have 6' of "wasted" space in the canter hallway between dining and kitchen. If you really want an eat in kitchen, you need to take some of that hall space into the kitchen.

I agree with pixie. You've wasted MORE space in this last version by creating a hallway beside the power room. Space you desperately need if 5 people are going to live here.

And the kitchen table also wastes space because you are showing seating on both sides. Not gonna work.

I really really like your new plan! I've always loved center hall homes anyway. On a floor plan, it looks like wasted space, but in reality it often can create much better traffic flow. Especially with little ones who are growing so fast they don't know how big they are! Also a fun place to scooter from front to back. Or have matchbox car races. Be prepared!

Comments below:

First: I think the window seat is wonderful and that space can be used apart from eating... bird watching, reading, photos, all sorts of things. My kids LOVE to play legos and cars in window seats too. And I love them for any kind of fine print reading or needlework. So your dining space can be multifunctional! Unless you don't want that. In which case, just ignore me.

Second: Although the walkway spaces in the kitchen might not be roomy by modern standards, I personally love the cozy feel of a kitchen with a table in it (and chairs all the way around). I've been in kitchens smaller than this one with huge tables. Yes there is a little scurrying around, but I think those rooms tend to be happy and fun... more of a gathering spot. I'm thinking of changing out the island for a table in our new build for this very reason. It doesn't work on paper, but in real life I think it's wonderful. You can always fiddle with the size of the table and chairs later too, since your main dining space is just across the way.

Third: The family entrance/mud room/bath is a super great use of space. I guess I'm in the minority here, but I'd rather have the mess in that mud room hall than on the counters and floors in my kitchen. That may still happen I suppose. But at least the mud room will take the worst of it. :)

Fourth: My only concern is the study looks a bit smaller and you mentioned a number of people gathering in that space. But there IS a bathroom downstairs if needed for those visitors, and I think that will be appreciated even more.

Fifth: All those doors. Are those pocket doors? I'm the rare person who is a huge fan of pocket doors, as long as they are properly installed. It's so much easier to place furniture. I think you should keep all those doors. It's nice to be able to block off a room to watch a game or have a phone call where it's quiet (er). ;)

Is the laundry upstairs?

Overall I think you accomplished a great deal without adding alot of square footage.

No to the new kitchen. With chairs/stools all around the island, you lose drawer storage and make it uncomfortable to use the island. We rent a beach cottage with this type of set up . . . And I hate it.

I see two possibilities:

- Lose the cabinet on the back wall / move refrigerator to the main part of the work space. This will allow you enough walking space / work space behind the island so you can have seating on the back side -- comfortably.

- Arrange your cabinets into a u shape around the walls, skip the island, and place a table in the corner.

I tried something within the original footprint. It seems like your new iterations were getting larger and larger.

This one has a smaller kitchen, no island, but peninsula seating; a powder room; and a coat closet under the stairs.

Thanks everyone for the feedback (and redheaded daughter for the encouragement! I love imagining our children playing in various areas of the house - I really like the idea of a window seat just out of the action but with a good view - I know I would have spent hours there when I was young).

MrsPete, your suggestion gave me an idea for rearranging the kitchen storage to give more elbow room.Thoughts?!

Hi Palimsest, we must have posted at the same time! I like the plan that you posted, and that it is more modest than the one I've been working on. I'll have to put some thought to it. I like that you kept the hall and the separate but connected rooms.The powder room location is a smart use of that back hall space.

Also - yes, those are pocket doors. I love being able to close off and open up rooms as needed, especially when you have different demographics of people around at once (little kids, parents, teens) - it's so nice to be able to shut out noise, or have a private discussion, etc. I'm not very old but I'm pretty old fashioned.

In my opinion, you lost what I like most about the lower floors of colonials--connection between kitchen and LR (because, my kids like to be where I am, and I like to keep an eye on them. If you are having 3 kids, you can look forward to 5+ years of infancy...where you'll have a newborn or a toddler at your feet in the kitchen, all. the.time. Because, you can't park them in the LR and see them (nor they, you)...

I agree that with small children in your future, you should keep the connection between the kitchen and the living room.

Also, you're likely to spend more time in the kitchen and the living room. When your kids are old enough to go out into the back yard alone, you'll like that these two rooms are to the back of the house. You won't want to sit in the dining room and watch them play, but you will sit in the living room and watch them play.

I liked the house better when the study and dining room were to the front of the house. It seems to function better in that way.

The chairs all around the island definitely do not work. You're not going to get an eat-in kitchen in this space, not without losing something else. I say move the dining room back to the front and work on more connection between the kitchen and dining room: That'll give you the near-the-kitchen concept, and you won't be crowded.

davis.mbd - have you gone through renovation yet? I have found this thread extremely helpful forour remodel plans and have similar set up. I would appreciate any update you can give on the space. Thank you!