Here's the floor plan
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a385/niccig03/KitchenFloorPlan-1.jpg

Oops, didn't get the right HTML coding,

You are thinking of a very large juggling of the entire floor plan. This will be quite expensive.

First thing you need to do is to learn your house. You need to know which walls are load bearing walls. These will be expensive to deal with. Doors/openings on these walls can be expensive to move. You are in CA, so you will have strict guidelines regarding earthquake/seismic constuction practices and shear walls. Since you house is from 1940s, you maybe required to do a significant retrofit for seismic stability. Not sure and this is where the architect comes in. Again, if you can learn which exterior and interior walls are shear walls of your house, this will help with floor plan development in terms of cost effectiveness.

However, all other walls can be completely elimated easily. So figure out which walls must stay (to have some budgetary control) and start laying out the floor that suits the entire house.

To help with such large remodel, we don't even know how your family enters the house and how you get to the kitchen from that floor plan you submitted...

Once you have figured out the "kitchen" space which makes the best "house plan", then you can optimize the kitchen layout. You need to make sure the house has a good flow first. Kitchen is only one part of the entire house. I think you are a bit ahead of planning steps...

Kaismom - thanks for the reply. Yes we know this will be expensive, but we're not moving from this house. We've been saving for a few years and could do either the kitchen remodel or the extension now. To do both together, means waiting a little longer. This is a cheaper option than adding a 2nd story. And it is cheaper than buying another house. Crazy I know but our neighbours knocked down their house and rebuilt as it was cheaper than buying a different home.

Good point about seismic construction - I'm fairly sure our house was updated when the family room was added on 15 years ago, but I'll need to check into it.

Load bearing walls - yes, that will be the first thing to work out.

We enter the house through the laundry room. You get to the kitchen through the current dining room and family room - I have those doorways marked on the floor plan. I don't have a full house plan, but it's set up as front door to house, turn right to go through living room, then into dining room and into kitchen. The other side of the family room is a hallway for 2 bedrooms and bathroom, and to the front door. I need to get someone in to do the current house plan.

Changing the living room to a dining room with seating area means moving furniture around. We can do this right now, DH wants to try it this weekend to see if we like it. If we want to make the opening on that wall larger, that does involve work, but it may not be necessary as we have 2 french doors that open into that room as it is.

Yes the kitchen would be gutted, but it needs to be done. The cabinets are falling apart, the appliances are 20 years old, the floor needs to replaced.

DH had another idea. We could add the bathroom off our master bedroom to make a master suite. We could move the laundry room into the current 2nd bath room, which is very small for a bathroom, but fine for a laundry room. The laundry room would now be a mudroom and main entrance for us into the house. From the breakfast nook would be access to a 3rd bedroom. This would be less change to current flow - still get in the house the same way, still get into kitchen same way.

I hesitate to say anything without seeing the entire floor plan of the house and knowing which walls are structural.

But I can give this a bump!

Bnorepanic - thanks for the bump, but yes you are right. I need a whole house floor plan and to know which walls are structural. When we started thinking about doing the kitchen, we also brought up other problems with our house layout. Moving the kitchen will let us fix those...but we now need to look at the house as a WHOLE.

I'll get someone in to do the floorplan. Or, is that something I can do myself???

You can do a rough floor plan yourself if you can measure and draw to scale. However, without knowing what is important in the house construction, ie where the drain stack is located, load bearing walls, floor and roof joists running which direction etc, it is only a child's exercise. There is alot more to moving walls around than what happens on a piece of paper. Yes, you can do anything if you throw enough money at it, however. But you don't want to be in that position...

I suggest you think about what type of house you want and what is really important to you and be clear about that first.

If you are changing the exterior of the house much, then you should really search architectural/design magazines to give to the architect about what you like and don't like about the houses that you see.

When you and the architects have agreed on where the kitchen should go, then you can optimize the kitchen in that space. Before than, figure out what is a must for your kitchen: ie pantry, 35/42 inch frig, cooktop/range etc.

When we did our large remodel, we spent 1 year between the two of us sorting out what we think we needed. The architect worked with us 6 months or so doing several iterations of the floor plan. The architect came up with ideas that never even occurred to us and made huge improvements to the house. I suggest that you spend your energy finding a good architect that you can rely on and trust and respect the work. Even if you have a family member that is an architect, that may or maynot be the best decision in the end....

I would post on the "Building a Home" forum. However, here's an idea assuming the wall b/w the FR & Kitchen stays but wall b/w Kitchen & new DR (old LR) is removed.

I don't know what the dimensions are of your LR, but have you considered moving the Kitchen into the LR and making the current Kitchen the DR? You want quite a bit in your Kitchen, but I don't think you have a big enough space to get everything you want. It's something to think about anyway.

Here is a link that might be useful: Building a Home Forum

buehl,
Thank you for taking the time to make this layout. I never thought to have the current kitchen become a bedroom. As we look more into an addition, the sticker shock means that we'll need to make better use of our current square footage, and your plan does this.

DH would love to move the 3/4 bath to off our bedroom - that will be a pricey addition but it gives us a Master bedroom suite - which many homes in our area have. If we do that, it frees up even more space on the kitchen side of the house, so we might not need to add on there.

Our living room is very big, but every wall has windows that are 20" off the ground. It's at the very front of the house. We can see it being a dining room with smaller seating area with the kitchen opening into that. I could see Thanksgiving dinner with pushing the seating furniture out of the way and having 2 long tables end to end.

I know my wish list for a kitchen is TOO long. I will have to give up on a lot of that. I can dream can't I of winning the lottery?? I'm a pretty realistic person, so as we plan more, I'll cross off what can't happen.

We're hoping to get a proper house plan drawn up and then we can sit and look at all of the layout possibilities. I will definitely post back, so that I can get advice from everyone here. You are all very talented with use of space - I'm not a spatial person and I have difficulty seeing how things can be laid out.

Thanks again.

Here's another idea...

Just realized something, though, the Laundry Room is mis-labeled on the layouts...it's actually 5'0" deep, not 4'0".