thinking about tackling the kitchen...fill that hole!

11 years ago

(I know I asked about this mess last year, but can't find my previous posts. And I'm thinking of doing something different now that I've been here a while...)

This is my house, before we moved in and obscured everything with stuff.

Long ago it had a living room with jumbo fireplace, a family room with another fireplace, and a kitchen with a little dining nook. Someone removed the wall between living and family rooms and installed a peninsula that fed into the kitchen whose walls were removed as much as possible. (No. Not done with permits. But as Realtor said, it hasn't fallen down yet!) The refrigerator lives in the dining nook.

I thought about restoring the walls. I thought about adding on a kitchen out the back and turning the kitchen into a something else, and now I'm thinking of leaving it open, removing the peninsula where it sticks out into the living/family rooms, removing the living room fireplace (it is partially trashed and takes up a great deal of space). I just don't know quite how to deal with the hole between kitchen and bigroom.

View from family room: red walled fireplace would go away. Hoping I could run duct for range hood through the orphaned chimney which is front and center on the roof. Peninsula would go. Let's not even mention the pendants.

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View from dining nook into living room and kitchen. Need to lose the nub of counter sticking out (a relic from refacing original 50s cabinets) and find a place for the fridge. Otherwise it works okay.

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View into the nook from the kitchen. Fridge goes in that corner by the patio furniture. You can almost see the other fireplace in the family room.

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So I'm thinking of embracing the open floorplan, making it even opener than it is now. Join the living and family rooms without the miserable wing of a peninsula (that does hold a ton of adult beverages) and have some sort of kind of open passthroughish kind of thing from the kitchen.

Maybe a proper door from kitchen to bigroom, maybe even properly framed with a pocket door since that's a recurring theme. And a closeable passthrough from kitchen to bigroom, about where the stove currently is. The house was built in the 1950s and I don't mind using completely out-of-date features like this. I'm thinking short high cabinets that wrap around/hide the header and some sort of wall to hide the kitchen counter. I do like the ability to close off my kitchen.

I'm not concerned about actual kitchen layout at this point--it's a good size and I'm confident I can fit enough kitchen in a given space.

Or, what would you do?

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Comments (2)

rosie
11 years ago
Your rooms really look promising, Fori. It's going to be very nice.

If you're really removing the fireplace, I'm imagining a very simple, clean wall separating the kitchen and open room, which would have your doorway with pocket door to one side. Where the counter runs behind the wall, there would be 1 or 2 openings in it rising from the counter itself to the ceiling or that ?beam? up there--unframed, very clean and streamlined. There are various kinds of sliding devices that could be hidden in the wall, or even the counter, to close it/them off.

The wall would be left solid in places where it was desirable to hide some of what's going on in the kitchen, open elsewhere for all the reasons it's nice to be open. I've seen examples of this on websites, including Houzz, and really liked some of them a lot for their elegance and function, ideally designed almost as a sculptural element with careful eye to proportion and placement. The background on the opposite wall is composed to be part of the picture, of course.

Are you sure you don't want to salvage the fireplace, though? The kitchen seems to have good space. Is the LRM too narrow with it? The bulk of the fireplace looks as if it performs the same function the solid wall I was describing above would--hiding some of what's going on. The stove could slide down behind it and a corresponding wall be built at the outer end of the counter, leaving the center (or?) open. Also, if you pulled the wall off behind it, you might find some additional inches there. Or not. :)
Fori
Original Author
11 years ago
Thanks for the ideas, Rosie. I didn't think of MULTIPLE holes!

I was thinking the range would go behind the fireplace approximately (its original location) and that wall would remain, just skinnied down a bunch. Something has to hold up the house!

I'm thinking perhaps I don't need to be able to close it--something as simple as a 3 foot wide hole with a builtin planter box on the living room side could be enough. It's not like I'd ever want to pass anything through the passthrough.

The living room is definitely too narrow (and lacking walls for furniture placement). The fireplace is incomplete somehow. Certain features just aren't there. I'm sure it once had a mantle! The fireplace juts into the living room about 3 feet (and 6' wide). The hearth goes another 18"--and extends the length of the living room. That has to go for sure. I think there were once builtins next to the fireplace. The walls are weird, there is a hole in the stonework on the side (see the brown square?). Here's a closeup of the "bar" area--see the stone hearth (?) continues and the gap is filled in with kitchen vinyl. Treacherous place for a bar stool for sure!

I think keeping one fireplace should be plenty since we don't use either!
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thinking about tackling the kitchen...fill that hole!

Comments (2)

rosie

Fori
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thinking about tackling the kitchen...fill that hole!

Comments (2)

rosie

ForiOriginal Author

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Fori
Original Author