The tri-ply Tramontina set from Wal-mart gets excellent reviews, if you'd like a nice stainless tri-ply set without the All Clad price. My sister has it, and I was impressed with it. Light weight, heats evenly, beautiful. Tramontina set Wal-mart also has for sale individually a 12 in. covered saute pan with a handle for $70, and a 4 quart covered casserole pan for $50. Both look useful for family quantities. I'm with golddust re cast iron pans. I bought some rusty old pieces from ebay for $15 to restore & just love them. For light weight sauce pots, though, those Wal-mart Tramontina pots look great. My pots are stainless with a disk bottom, and are heavy & cumbersome for cooking delicate sauces.

I'll be the odd (wo)man out here. I love to cook, but I've been doing since I was 11 yrs old, and frankly cooking 7 days a week is drudgery. Add in breakfast and/or lunch and it's a pain. I loved my career and it wasn't unusual to be gone 12-13 hrs, 5 days/wk. Weekends were crammed with errands and family/friends. We are fortunate to live in one of the greatest restaurant areas in the world: the San Francisco Bay Area. There is great food at all price points. You can eat for $5 or $500, but either way you could eat well -- check out NYTimes' Seth Kugel's visit last month to Portland, where he gave himself an $8/meal budget and was wowed by the amazing meals he got from the local food trucks. When I worked it wasn't unusual for us to go out 4-5x/wk. The question was, "What country do you want to eat today?" We could do Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cal-Mex, American, Moroccan, Korean, French, Italian, Burmese, Greek, and more - all within 1 mile walk, and usually several iterations of each one (you couldn't even count how many Chinese restaurants of various regionalities there were). Now we're retired. We have both money and time. When I feel like cooking, I make the dishes that took too much time when I was working - long slow braises or slow-roasting, or dishes that just require an enormous amount of prep. But we still go out 3-5x/wk, When we travel around the area as we like to do (we just got back from Napa last week and will be in Sonoma next month), we travel specifically to eat. In Napa, we had amazing, elegant, fabulous Cal-French food that I would never bother cooking in a million years. There were brilliant combinations, such as the black cod served with a seafood sabayon, roasted matsutake mushrooms, and the tiniest perfect baby turnips that had no bitterness at all. Or an amazing carpaccio, dressed with nothing but a touch of Meyer lemon EVOO. I cook when I want to, but dining out is simply more fun. No shopping, no prep, no dirty dishes, no leftovers, no fuss. Yes, I could grow my own piquillo peppers and buy Ceylon cinnamon -- but why? I'd rather go to the great Spanish tapas restaurant a few minutes away and have them roast, skin and stuff the peppers with fresh chevre; roast, skin and sprinkle the cinnamon on fresh beets; and make that perfect paella 'tradicionale" for my spouse and the dreamy Fideua Negre, noodle paella with squid ink, for me. I mean, do I seriously want to buy a pressure cooker just for my octopus? Why should I bother cleaning and skinning a cephalopod when there's at least a dozen restaurants that make fabulous smoke-grilled octopus within 5 miles of our house? Should I want to soak the bacalhau in 8 changes of water over two days? It would just be so much easier to go to the Cuban or Portuguese or Italian restaurants, and have a couple of orders of really amazing salt cod fritters or roasted salt cod with polenta, instead! The take-out food these days is so much better quality than before. One place offers a marvelous frozen (bake it at home) chicken pot pie - perfect butter pastry, organic chicken breast and organic vegetables - all they offer is either a fried chicken sandwich on artisanal roll with housemade slaw, or the pot pie. That's it; they open 4 days/wk for 3 hrs a day and then go home to raise their baby daughter. Lines out the door every day. One specialty market with various food sellers (we lust after their pork tomahawk chop - wowie! What a hunk of meat!) has lovely little frittatas with artichoke, red pepper and Gruyere. My DH hates frittatas, so I buy one for myself while he gets the penne with San Marco marinara and Kurobuta pork meatballs; that way we both win. I loathe Food Network. When I write up reviews on the restaurants we've eaten at (I do it for my own archives, not to publish them), I often refer negatively to "Food Network chefs" - cooks who slop the food out as fast as possible, in ridiculous combinations of too many ingredients. They don't know the difference between a sauce Amoricaine and a Bordelaise. Bleh. It's taken me decades to get my DH off the crappy food he grew up with. But he's finally come around, so that when we drop $$$$ on the perfect dinner at Etoile or Spoonbar or La Folie, he says, "That was absolutely worth every penny." And you know, it is. Here is a link that might be useful: NYTimes Frugal Traveler does Portland on the cheap This post was edited by jkom51 on Wed, Sep 10, 14 at 0:17

I'm new to this discussion. Would one more set of eyes be welcome? Your inspiration of moving the doors is a real game changer. Brilliant. U1 is, from my point of view, the best. Given the limited natural light and view, you do want the window to be the focus of that wall. May I address the mud/laundry room? We had one when the boys were growing up. It would be helpful if there was a seat to put on/take off boots etc. Otherwise they'll go to the banquette, tracking whatever with them. Perhaps a window seat under the window by the door. It could then have boot cubbies underneath. You say the room is 7' wide. That makes it pretty narrow to have a full 24" counter on both sides. Consider the outside wall being solid 12" or 18" cabinets. Do think about putting a front loader and dryer under a counter, even if you don't put doors in front of them. It gives you a place to sort and fold. Or put a laundry basket. The sink could then be part of that counter. Putting a door where the window is from the laundry to the porch seems like a natural. Folks (boys) on the porch/patio can get to the beverages/sink/ without going through the house. I know you have an office, but the kitchen does tend to become communication central. Have you thought about a place for the phone and attendant notes? Perhaps the end of the cabinet run facing the back door in U1 or the end of banquette near that door? The banquette may well become the go to place for homework and school projects. Lighting? storage under the banquette? Finally have you thought about putting a skylight in the porch roof outside the kitchen window? At the end of of the day, you are going to have a wonderful house.

I have attempted to read a truly dreadful book which I cannot throw anywhere as it was a gift, but as soon as decently possible I'll pass it on to a charity shop. The 'story' called Code Girls set during WWII is about a group of females sent to a large mansion to supposedly learn the 'art' of cypher breaking. But our three heroines are cooks/skivvies working in the kitchens. They are all endlessly describes by their brown/hazel/green/blue/flashing eyes, their long floaty/curly locks and their curvy/slim/long-legged figures. They giggle endlessly and their merry laughter 'tinkles' from dawn to dusk. I am rather hoping Hitler drops a bomb on the lot of them. The 'author' also makes several basic clangers . . . getting the name of the Prime Minister wrong, describing the vehicle driven by handsome local vet (he of the golden chest-hair and brown muscular arms) as a battered 'Land Rover' some ten years before it was designed, plus others too boring to relate. Many females reviewers at Amazon loved it!