Newbieremodeler, This is my opinion but there are few things that are necessary in making a small home function well for a family for a LONG time, not temporarily until you buy a bigger house. But a well functioning home where you can raise a family. I am thinking about this alot lately because we are buying some rental properties and trying to make these homes "livable" for a family so they are easily rentable. These are things I am thinking about.... 1. Eat in kitchen is not necessary but a kitchen that is close and CONNECTED to an eating area is. (there is a difference) You can connect to an eating area with visual and physical connection. 2. Easy access to the nice green space in your backyard/sideyard that allows you to connect to the outdoors. This allows you to enjoy summer BBQs and perhaps entertain easily in the summer. (I would put sliding glass door from your dining room to make it happen easily in your house). You can't afford the linear foot without cabinets in the kitchen. So you have to put the slider in the dining. This is a typical small home solution. An easy way to make your house livable is to put a deck across the east side of the house (kitchen dining side if this give you a nice access to the yard and increasing the entertaining space without adding on to the house.) 2. Dining area that accomodates a larger group of people with rearrangement of furniture to host occasional parties, ie Thanksgiving, birthday parties, having another family over for dinner is ABSOLUTELY necessary for long term staying power of a small home. I think this is a more important criteria than actual eat-in kitchen. When the house cannot accomodate life's meaningful events in your own home, you feel that your house is not "good" or "big" enough. I think older home designs (pre-WWII) understood this well and gave generous spaces to the dining area even though they did not give enough to the kitchen. Imagine feeling that you can never host a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 at your house because there is no way to make it happen even with rearrangement of the furniture.... In your current kitchen, you can probably seat 6 to 8 adults in the dining and a card table with kids in the living room. Set the table close to the dining opening near the fireplace and have a nice Thanksgiving/holiday party at your home for 10 or more people. This allows you to create memories for your kids. In many of your plans, there is no way you can host the holidays at your home: ie the banquet kitchen and the kitchen eat in table.... These are great for larger homes where there are other areas to host a large party but not in a small home, IMHO. Do you forsee yourself hosting family parties? Dining rooms that are somewhat open to living room rearranges furniture easier for parties. There are people who never host sit down dinners (informal for families. I am not even taking FORMAL) at their homes because it is impossible. On the other hand, I have been in homes that are much smaller but the house makes holiday dinners happen. If you think having these life's events in your home is important to you, then you need to design for it. I think many of your designs show 36 inch opening between the dining and LR. I think this is smaller than what you already have. (58 inches, I am reading). I am not sure what the reason is behind this.... I would open up dining area as much you can given the load bearing condition. Figure out the house first then the kitchen. This is really important! This is not easy because you have to optimize everything and look ahead to the kind of family you will have. You need to have a reasonable plan for various phases of your family's life. For example, if you are a family that will watch TV in the basement, then you need to plan for the basement media room. More questions about the house: How will you use your basement as you have kids? Will you be satisfied with 1 bath on the main or wil need/want to add 1/2 or 1 bath on the main? Where is the nice part of the yard? How will you access that? Do you use the garage to park? If so, do you enter the house through the kitchen? Do you just use the garage as a storage and never enter the house that way? You can add storage in the garage easily to put overflow kitchen stuff in there IF you move the kitchen to where the dining is currently. (as is one of your ideas) In a small home, I actually prefer this type of arrangement than making a kitchen that is too big for the house... (there should be a balance of rooms in a given house) Do you have places for young toddlers/school aged kids to go and play on a rainy/cold day? Where will the toddlers eat? (I had a small toddler table next to my kitchen island for couple years until my kids were old enough to climb the stool easily. The booster chair streapped to the stool did not work for us as well.) Do you have places for teenagers to hangout and have some privacy? Do you have a place for adults to have a little quiet and solitute from one another. (Bedroom is fine for this if you design for it) Do you have a place for occasional overnight guests? How do you enter the house? Where to you drop your stuff as you enter? When I look at your LR, it looks underutilized to me. i would close that opening, and put a wall there so you can cluster the seating arrangement next to the FP. Then you move the kitchen where the DR is now. You create some storage in the garage that stores all your large occasional kitchen stuff. The dining room should have a large opening to the LR which makes the rearranging for large parties easy. You can see into the dining and you feel more connected to the family. (if you DH watches TV and he won't budge from that, then you need to be able to see the TV from the kitchen to feel connected to the family) The couch should face the FP and you can have a console behind the couch which will create a space near the front door a sense of entry. These are some ideas to get you started.... Good luck.

Lavendar, I love those windows in her kitchen! I've really been working hard on the yard for the last few years, and I want the house to engage the outdoors! Here's a new one, based on what you all are talking about. oh - I forgot to label the DW, to the right of the sink. This would be a less expensive reno, because the wall between the sunroom and the dining room is structural (as is the one between the sunroom and the living room). With this plan, I wonder what value there is in pushing out into the sunroom....other than this plan preserves the existing dining room, which I kind of hate to be in because it's dark and it functions like a hallway. I like it quite a bit... I'm struggling with not being able to have a table right in the middle of that space, in front of those windows. I want to stand there at the sink and look out, AND be able to sit there! We have a stool jammed into the current kitchen now by the back window, and I love sitting there and looking out at the yard. It irritates me that there's really no space to sit there now, with a 22" deep peninsula with no overhang! I'd love to sit there with my husband and have breakfast. I also don't think I can lose that second doorway to the bedrooms, because of the level change at the other opening. But, I think I we can push the fridge back into the closet in the sunroom, which could make it look like a built in, no? Thank you thank you thank you!

Hi Marcolo Thank you. It did not occur to me to simply eliminate that box and replace it with storage. I just figured we were stuck with it. And you are right: it is just an empty box sitting there taking up space. And, since it is made of uninsulated 3/4" wood, it probably makes the kitchen cold. So either of your ideas -- the bench or the cabinet -- would make that space more useful, and warm it up at the same time. Fiberglass for the door. I will investigate that material. I had asked one carpenter if the door could be remade in Azek, but he thought it would not be rigid enough. So I started thinking about Azek with a backing of plywood, but then I imagined that double layer would again make the door very heavy and difficult for me to open and close which is why I haven't taken pictures of of the headroom yet. I need DH's help for that project, and he has been tied up with a tennis tournament this week. I think we can do it on Sunday. Hi rmtdoug, Good points, all. Although it would squeeze the sink closer to the cooktop, I will ask the carpenter when he next stops by about shortening that wall from the mudroom to the kitchen, I would very much like to do that if it is not too costly, especially after seeing lisa_a's latest design with an expanded mudroom just off that space. When I saw her good idea I realized we would not have to preserve much of that mudroom/kitchen wall at all to maintain the current size of the mudroom since we could just open up the other wall and, until we get a shed built, store a whole lot of necessary gear close to the back door, including a snow shovel in winter and a rake in summer. Hi lisa_a, What an incredible design idea. I absolutely love it and it solves so many of our problems simultaneously. The pocket door between the bath and the shower is a clever solution. The only sticking point is that the maximum opening on that wall (where you have shown the entry to the new mudroom) is only 28" because there is an old chimney on one side. The chimney is shown on the architectural drawing as a funny shaped rectangle protruding into the "shower" area on the plan. That unused chimney is actually a square that sits outside the kitchen on the mudroom-side of the wall. However, I so love your design that I want to use it anyway. If we ripped through some of the trim on that bathroom we could widen the opening to a suitable sized doorway. I realize I need to upload all the dimensions of the mudroom, the BP and the dining room. My design software has arrived and I have used it to outline the kitchen with some gross dimensions, but I need to get all the dimensions on it because you and Jillius have had to guess the measurements of areas outside the kitchen. I see you drew the stairs opening to the living room. Thank you. Now that you have imagined how that will look, do you think the opening to the kitchen from the living room should be closed up and the sink sited there? I ask this in case we can afford to widen the kitchen opening from the mudroom as rmtdoug suggests since doing that would cut down on the length of the sink/cooktop wall. The distance from the inside wall of the kitchen (the one with the mudroom on the other side) to the furthest wall of the BP (with the dining room on the other side) is 181". The distance from that same kitchen wall to the closest-to-the-BP dining room wall is 185.5". Let me know if those measurements are not what you were looking for.

M, So great to hear your take on form following function. I think we share a practical streak. On the one hand, I'm not a preservationist, on the other I do want to be true to the spirit of the house. I'm not aiming to make it something its not, and I don't want to "over improve" either. I agree that its entirely possible to "design a modern functional home and have the original vintage design-spirit prevail". In fact, thats precisely the balance I'm striving to achieve. In my situation, honoring the vintage design spirit means keeping certain elements intact: --the cottage windows --the china cabinet --the built-ins in the living room flanking the fireplace I'm not as attached to keeping the kitchen and breakfast room spaces separate as my partner is. In the spirit of cooperation and domestic harmony ;-) I've solicited feedback on how we could fit everything in the footprint of the kitchen proper, and posters to this thread stepped up admirably (THANK YOU!!) Reading the comments here has allowed me to feel more comfortable with merging the kitchen and the breakfast room--that this might be the right place to "modernize". Considering the two spaces as one is beginning to feel…well…more practical to me. Your point about it being possible to botch both the form and the function strikes a cautionary note---Sheesh, that would be awful. Aiming to avoid this, on both counts! Thanks so much M, for your always incisive comments.