would it work to put the stove on the ext wall? ('south' as shown on the diagram / 'north' would be the side you now show your stove on - even tho those aren't the actual directions as your house sets. They are as the diagram is)

that would get your cooking area a bit more out of the walking area and you'd be able to vent to the outside easily. and no crossing the 'walk area' with water for the stove or hot water to dump in the sink.

I'd want lots of windows on that wall - tho, that will take away dish storage. being short (like me - I'm 5') how about drawers to the right of the sink for dish storage?

I can only reach the 1st shelf of my upper cabs. In my 'perfect' world the highest shelf would have glass fronts for display since I can't use them on a regular basis anyway.

the middle shelf would be for things seldom used...

You could then use the 'north' wall for fridge/frzr, pantry, the micro and baking maybe?

you could have the extending cabs off of the 'west' end of the 'north' wall (west being by the DR area).

can you put drawers in the lower cabs w/o dh having a cat?

Can't really move the stove because the gas & 220 are both in the wall right behind the current stove. I forgot to say we are on a tight budget for this.

The exterior wall faces west and the wall between the living room faces east.

You know I had thought of drawers for dish storage, and thought drawers would work a lot better for heavy casserole dishes. I have talked to a local cabinet builder about building a couple of doors so I can change the pantry to a pull out, and to add doors to the bookshelf on top of the oven/micro cabinet. I hadn't thought about glass, but that would work too. I don't have too many display worthy things though. But at least I could see what's in there.

In my wildest imaginations, I have a library ladder rail around the kitchen with a little closet that the ladder pops into when not in use. Talk about dh having a cat. I can just imagine if I told him that one.

About the windows, there will be a lot of windows in the dining room, and the kitchen door is full glass. I would dearly love more windows in the kitchen, but not at the expense of cabinets. I hope that having windows on both sides of the dining room will make up the difference.

I have to run this sec, but two quick things:

1. Look for the super thinny-thin Williams Sonoma stepstool. A lot of people here have it, and love it, because it's so skinny you can fit it between your front teeth.
2. Hutch, girl. Hutch. Build some storage that comes all the way down to the counter so you can reach it. You have counter space to do it without getting in the middle of main prep.

I'll try to noodle this more later.

How wide can that LR opening become? Can you take that wall out completely?

Thanks marcolo. this step stool? That is incredibly thin. I hadn't seen it before and I could slide it in beside the refrigerator.

A hutch is a good idea. I'll see where I can put one. Can't open the wall completely. It is a load-bearing wall, and there is a gas line in the wall just about even with the stove top. When we changed to electric stove, we capped the gas line and left it in the wall in case we ever wanted to go back to a gas stove. And I might next time I change stove tops.

A few thoughts:

(1) You need a pullout the right size to hold a folding stepstool. This stepstool is going to be invaluable. I have the one linked below; it's great. If you had a big budget and were the only cook, I would suggest making a kitchen like the one I once saw in a house when we were house shopping--the kitchen was remodeled to fit the five-foot-tall cook. It was amazing. The counters weren't 36", more like 32." The uppers weren't 18" above the counters but more like 16" (making them 6 inches lower than standard kitchen uppers).

But you know what, I'm sure she still had a stepstool, because how else could she reach the top shelves of the uppers? You need a stepstool no matter what, and so you should build in a pullout for it. And if the kitchen is big enough, heck, you might need two stepstools, one at each end. Maybe you could have a pullout in the cabinets especially for the stepstool, and then configure your broom closet or broom pullout so that it can also hold a folding stepstool.

(2) Bringing the uppers down a bit would be nice so that you don't need the step stool quite as often--at least you'll be able to easily reach anything on the first shelf and maybe things at the front of the second. But beware, certain things might not fit under the uppers if there's only 15"-16" instead of 18". So take stock: how tall are your coffee maker/stand mixer/blender/etc.? Where does it make sense for them to be? The goal here is to figure out if you can bring down all your uppers or if you could just bring down some (say, the ones on THIS wall but not THAT wall). If it works, practically and aesthetically, to lower some of your uppers, then the things to be stored in those uppers are the things you use often. Leave the higher uppers to hold things you rarely use or things only the taller members of your family use (e.g. teenage son's favorite mugs, water bottles etc.).

(3) Depending on your budget and your existing counter, slimming down your counter might make it possible for you to lower your uppers even more while still fitting counter gadgets under them. If you have a 2" thick counter, look into a 1/2"-3/4" thick one (not all counter materials can be made that thin but there certainly are options).

Here is a link that might be useful: Folding stepstool

Wouldn't a kitchen made for short people be wonderful? Or a whole house. When I see movies or tv shows shot in old houses in England with the men ducking to go through the doors, I think the house is the greatest, and dh (who is 6'4") cringes at the thought of hitting his head on stuff.

Actually, I can reach everything on the lower and middle shelves of my kitchen, so they might already be lower than standard. There is room for my kitchenAid when the head is down, but not when it is up.

I am thinking of getting one or two of those pull down shelves from rev-a-shelf, but they seem to take up a lot of room without much room for items, so I may just leave the top shelves for seldom used stuff. And on the lower cabinets with the regular middle shelf and dark hole, I'm going to check into converting them to drawers. I don't use several of the lower cabinets for much because I don't want to get down on my hands and knees reach back there.

I've reworked it again. How will this work? Does the bar look weird? I made it narrow where it goes into the living room both because I don't want bar stools on the wood floor and so it wouldn't be in the way for people walking into the kitchen.
{{gwi:1736284}}

that's looking good! will you be able to keep/expand your window over the sink?

Any particular reason you put the sink across from the range? There was a pretty exhaustive discussion of why not to do that in Small Kitchen & Dining Room thread, and also in the thread about what ranges are safest for kids (link below) (the title of that thread was sarcastic--the point was that kitchen design, not range choice, is what influences whether you have accidents/burns happening).

The basic problem is that if the range and sink are across from each other, you are designing a kitchen in which accidents are waiting to happen because you force yourself to walk across the kitchen with hot water and hot and/or dirty pans. It's especially dangerous if you have pets or small kids or if pets/kids are ever guests in your house, but the danger is only reduced, not eliminated, if pets/kids are not an issue.

A galley or modified galley like you're proposing is fine, but it is MUCH SAFER to put the sink and range on the same side, and the fridge/freezer on the opposite side. There is no safety advantage to putting the fridge on the same run as another fixture (i.e. sink or range), but there is a major advantage to putting the sink and range on the same run: you can empty your boiling pasta water, take pans to the sink after you use them, etc., without ever walking across the open floor. So there is no opportunity for kids or pets to get underfoot or in the way, or for you to slip, and drop hot things on kids/pets/the floor.

Given your constraints, I would suggest putting the sink on the same run as the range and the wall oven on the fridge run. Putting a wall oven there is way less dangerous than putting the range there, first off because using a wall oven never involves pots of boiling water, and second because usually when people take things out of the oven the first thing they do is set them on the counter to cool--so stuff would come out of the wall oven and be set down beside it to cool; stuff would not be carried, hot, across the kitchen.

But I think what would actually make the most sense here, since you have a longer run on the bottom, is to put DW, sink and range along the bottom, and move the fridge and freezer up to the top. They should probably go on the end where the wall oven is shown, so put either a pullout or a couple of feet of counter between them--from right to left it would go freezer, fridge, counter or pullout, wall oven, more counter.

Here is a link that might be useful: Thread on burn-safe kitchen design

desertsteph, with it this way, I can only make the window taller, but not wider.

ideagirl2, I left the range and ovens on that side because that's where they were originally, and that is where the gas line and 220 wiring is. I think I can slide the range down and still be able to hook up to it. The gas comes in through the slab, so moving it would be extremely expensive I think, though I didn't check. And I left the sink in it's place for the same reason. I've lived with it this way for 15 years without any major mishaps, just a lot of drips across the floor.

I would like to have the refrigerator on the same wall as the sink so the line to the ice-maker can be run behind the cabinets. Right now it goes up the wall (which is an exterior wall) and across the attic and back down into the wall. Winter before last, we had a hard freeze, which is rare for us. The line in the attic froze, burst, and we had Niagra Falls through the ceiling. We had to replace sheetrock and part of the wood flooring in the living room. It was a real mess.

That flood--ick!!! Yikes!

Do you not have a basement things can be run through?

No basements here. We're on slab. It makes it much harder to move things around.