First, I love the size of your kitchen and I wish mine were that big!

I would swap the fridge and pantry, only because it seems like your fridge is out in no man's land by itself on the drawing. I also think it would be much more convenient to the stove and the sink if it were where the pantry is located now.

If I counted it out right, your fridge is about 10 feet from your stove and your entire triangle is 27 feet, which is a lot of walking if you need butter from the fridge to put in a pan, then walk to the sink to drop the knife in the water and walk back to the fridge to put the butter back. Of course, my entire triangle is under 10 feet, but I made about 10 round trips of my triangle to cook breakfast this morning.

Yes, I'm just starting the process as well and I'm doing things like counting my steps from one spot to another and trying to figure out what kind of storage I need.

I wouldn't enlarge the island IF the drawing is to scale. It looks like you have 3.5 feet as walkways on the drawing. Much less is going to make it crowded, especially as your helpers get older.

If you're putting a prep sink in the island anyway, I'd put it centered on the stove edge of the island. My personal preference would actually be a prep sink on the counter near the stove so that it could be used to fill pots.

I think you're on the right track to making a kitchen that works well for you and your family.

EDIT: sorry folks! There are 42" aisles all around the island, not 36".

lissa - thanks for your comments! I like the idea for the prep sink on the counter as my island isn't very big anyway. One poster asked about corner ovens - wonder if this is an option for me?

I think corner ovens might be nice...and would give you a nice bit of counter and cabinets between the fridge and ovens for the mixer and storing your baking needs.

With things as they are (and ovens in that corner), I would put the prep sink on the corner of the island nearest the fridge, so the largest work space is left toward the stove and ovens.

Are you concerned about family coming from the family room or bfast room, wanting to access drinks or snacks in the fridge? In the location you moved it to, they'd have to come through the whole kitchen.

You have the space to do corner ovens if you wished to have them. I'm planning to keep my freestanding stove because of budget and space constraints.

Actually, my husband suggested last night that we should just sell this house and move into one with a bigger kitchen, which would solve my whole problem! :)

Ok, so I've mocked up - still very rough :o) - moving the ovens to the corner. Now, what do I put in that spot? The pantry? A second pantry (oooh wouldn't that be nice)? The fridge? Nothing? sigh.......

RHome - I figure either way, the kids will be in my way :)- they use the pantry and the fridge about equal - unless I move the pantry to where the DO were and train them to walk through the DR area of the house to get snacks??

Why not move the fridge to where the pantry is by the MW area and have two pantries? One pantry could be for dishes, seldom used small appliances, and serving pieces and the other could be for food. I'd leave a small cabinet open in the MW area for microwave snacks like popcorn.

That would keep the kids from walking through the kitchen to get to the snacks and drinks.

lissa - not sure I'm understanding exactly, but next to the pantry on the far (north?) side of the kitchen (across from the penninsula) is the Message Center (MC). The MW is by the Ref on left.

My concern about moving the Fridge over by the MC is that I'm afraid that it will draw too much attn placed there - I don't want it to be the first thing you see as you round the bend into the kitchen.

DH says I'm putting waaaayyyyy too much thought into this...

I am concerned about the placement of your dishwasher. It looks as though you won't be able to stand at the sink when it is open, and if you can't work from the sink to the dishwasher, it will drive you nuts.

What if you moved the sink to the corner, and put the dishwasher all the way at the end of the cabinet to the right, where the sink is now, so you'd have plenty of clearance to get around when it is open? That change would also give you more counter space on both sides of the sink, particularly on the side nearest the breakfast room, where the dirty dishes will be easier to deposit after meals.

And I agree that your fridge would work better where the pantry is now...I think you'd like to have the fridge accessible from the breakfast room and family room for your family to get drinks and things out without having to come all the way through the kitchen and out again?

The double ovens in the corner near the stove look really good, particularly for when you are browning something that then goes into the oven.

In the space where the ovens were, I would give myself a long expanse of counter space from the sink to the pantry, and under it, I would put drawers for the baking and small prep supplies (measuring, mixing, etc..)and appliances (hand mixer, food processor, etc...) so it's easy to pull them out and use them either there or on the island.

In the lower cabinets between the stove and the fridge (where the pantry is now) I would put drawers for linens and potholders and hot pads and other things related to using the stove and fridge...and in the lower cabinets on the other side I would put one or two shallow drawers for all my spices and little prep bowls involved in seasoning, a deep drawer for oil and vinegar and other bottled things I'd want at hand, and then to the right of them I'd also put a single vertical cabinet with dividers for baking sheets and trays.

I'm going to shut up now!! Have fun figuring it all out!

Jnjmom...

• If this is a new house, what do you foresee is the normal (most common) flow of traffic through your house? If this is your current house, what is the actual traffic flow? I see it could be 2 or 3 different flows...Garage to Kitchen, Garage thru DR & Foyer to Great Room, Garage to Kitchen to Great Room.

  • When the kids come home from school...do/will they come in through the garage or front door? Where do/will they usually go next (I'm guessing the kitchen!)

  • When you and your DH come home for work, appointments, etc., do/will you come in through the garage? Where do/will you go next?

  • When you come home from grocery shopping?

  • When friends come over, what entrance do/will they use?

  • Other family?

Where will you eat most of your meals?

• Breakfast Room?

• Dining Room?

• Island?

I'm trying to determine the best places for things like the Message Center, MW, Refrigerator, Pantry...

It's too bad the walls cannot move since I think a much better flow would be to have the two kitchen entrances on the same side of the room! It would provide a protected area for cooking. Oh well...compromises!

BTW...you are NOT spending too much time with planning...a well-planned kitchen is a joy to work in; a poorly-planned kitchen is, at best, a constant annoyance and, at worst, a real PITA to work in! In my line of work we have found that it costs far less in both time & money to fix a problem in the requirements & planning stage than in the implementation & test stage! (The farther along you are in the life cycle, the more expensive in time & money it is to fix a problem.)

Interestingly, my DH said the same thing about spending too much time planning/designing...BUT he now tells me it was so worth all the time (& angst) spent planning the kitchen and that it's the best kitchen he's ever worked in! As for me, I find I enjoy cooking more than I used to and that I actually make excuses to go into the kitchen!

Hi jnjmom, I just wanted to point you to a recent thread about my friend's kitchen. Yours and hers are very similar in basic layout, and you might find the feedback that folks provided to her helpful in your situation.

And, I agree with Buehl--don't worry about spending too much time planning. Taking your time and getting it right is always better than rushing and regretting later.

Here is a link that might be useful: Thread about my friend's kitchen

bronwynsmom - wow! Thanks for your comments, they were very well thought out. I'm going to set them aside while I do buehl's checklist and then come back to them.

holligator - thanks for the link - I had followed that post for awhile and really didn't notice the resemblance, but you are right. We just have things swapped around.

buehl - this is a new construction, so trying my best to determine flow of traffic, I'd say much of it goes garage to kitchen. Kids coming home from school - us coming home - all will go from garage to kitchen 90% of the time. All guests will come in front door to LR then eventually to kitchen. Also, the hall that runs past kitchen is access to the bathroom - lots of traffic there. We will eat most meals in the breakfast room.

There actually was two doors in that wall in the original plan (where the fridge is). I need the wall space in the LR for furniture, and I wanted a more closed off kitchen - maybe I'll hate it, I dunno, but right now it sounds superb :o)

Again though, I can feel myself wanting to go form over function!! And for some reason I feel oddly guilty about that, like I'm afraid everyone will think I'm stupid? I dunno... But I really have this vision of walking around the corner of the LR - or through the door in the hall -and seeing this beautiful cabinet hood on that east wall. It may function better on the other wall, but then it wouldn't be the focal pt. (Not that my hood is really a show stopper, but it would seem to tie it together for me).

Sheesh now I'm rambling - just wanting to be sure you all know where I'm coming from. blah blah blah.

Thank you so much for you help - you guys are such a great sounding board, and much cheaper than therapy!

Now that you talk about it in more specifics and I check back with your plan, I am very worried about the traffic patterns in this house. Anyone coming from the garage has to go through the center of the kitchen or through the dining room to get to the stairs or great room. Anyone on the main floor, especially in the great room or bfast area has to go through the kitchen (or most likely will) to get to the bathroom. These are things that will happen often every day, and I would hate for the center of my kitchen to be such a highway.

Oh rhome!! I see what you are saying... I think I'm going to crawl into the fetal position...sigh... This is so hard!! Our DR in the previous home was a pathway for traffic to the den and it never bothered me, so I guess I assumed people could go that way and it not be an issue. I'm thinking about possibly making that DR an office area??

Oh, and had a phone convo with cabinet guy this morning and he says I won't have room for DOs in the corner because I only have 24" and need 33" for something blah blah blah I didn't understand...

I'm feeling the need to cuss. Or cry. Or both?

I suppose this is why they had the second kitchen entrance there, eh? I just have to have that wall space for my LR to function. We will have a huge sectional that will span the entire room, can't do that with only a seven foot wall. I have been in the house post construction both with the second doorway and without and never really considered the traffic flow issues until now.

I don't know if it matters, but I'm a sanguine people person and don't usually mind people in my way - gives me someone to talk to :o). Also coming from about an 8x12 galley kitchen where I was in my own way...

How about if the sink peninsula came out from the cooktop wall instead of the great room wall. People traffic could go along the great room wall which could house the fridge, pantry, micro and a message center. All things others need are out of the main cooks space.

Okay, honey, take a deep breath!

One of the things that sometimes happens when we design our own kitchens is that we lose the forest among the trees...and there is no other place in the house where function is more important. Sometimes wiping the slate clean and starting again with all the new things you've realized is much, much easier than tweaking a plan that has some difficult problems.

Since this is new construction, you aren't stuck like you would be if you were remodeling an impossible old house, so that's a great advantage.

Try this...do an old fashioned bubble diagram. It's a technique that allows you to work out the organization of a space based on the activities and the things that go on adjacent to the space and the flow. The link below is a good example of how one designer used them in a project...

You get a blank sheet, and make circles to represent the different areas/activities in your kitchen, like cooking and cleaning up and prepping and loading/unloading the dishwasher...include everything that will go on in there, like homework, or making lists, or friends having a drink while you cook. For a complicated space like a kitchen, you can sometimes do another one just for stuff, based on the first one...like where you need the dishes to live, and the pots, and the cookbooks, and the telephone. The size of the circles relates roughly to how much room that activity needs. The placement of the circles is based on what needs to be next to what. You draw arrows between the circles to show how you have to move from one to the other, and where you need circulation space. You can be as messy as you like, and start over as much as you like...don't be tempted to go all high-tech and do this digitally. Just paper and pencil! It's actually fun, and extremely revealing.

Let us know if you decide to try it, and how it goes!

Here is a link that might be useful: Example of how bubble diagrams work

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I like the bmorepanic's layout. I'm not that great coming up with kitchen layouts but I would say since you mentioned you like to entertain and have people over etc., a more open layout like bmorepanic might work better with your lifestyle. We opted not to open up our kitchen. We have a passthru, oversized doorways, and high ceilings to make it feel more open and that is fine when it is family. However, now that we want to have gatherings with other families with young kids and invite people over I do find I envy people have that open group gathering friendly layout. When we planned our kitchen we more so met friends out for dinner and didn't host parties so it didn't make sense to build for a lifestyle we didn't have. Now with kids - part of me wishes we had it more open. I do realize though when the kids get older it won't be a big deal and in the meanwhile what we have is fine if we want to invite one family over for dinner. Our space before could barely fit us.

What's great about Bmore's layout is that it doesn't open the kitchen any more than it was...All the mess and activity is still blocked by walls, but it does allow through traffic in a straight line and in a path that doesn't interfere with cooking...Much safer than people meandering through while you might be jockeying hot pots and pans. It also allows for the casual seating space for visitors and conversation... a couple of options, in fact. THIS is a kitchen I could really enjoy working in. The actual work area seems fantastic for one, or roomy enough and setup so you can have helpers, too. I would hope that at 9 and 13, they'll start doing that more and more. My kids' friends love to help and do baking projects in our kitchen, too.

Bmore's layout is wonderful, and seems to solve all the problems of the other one. It keeps the circulation out of the active cooking space, makes it easy to clear dirty things from both the other rooms, gives you a ton of elbow room everywhere, and makes the island big enough to make sense.
Bravo!
I'd stop right there...and start thinking about specifics of the cabinet insides to support the activities for each area.

I would open the kitchen to the great room, and put in a peninsula with seating like this:

Whoops! Oh shoot! Missed the part about walls can't move. You didn't mention that they couldn't be taken out though ;-). If you possibly can, this would really open up the whole space.

Message Center: It would work much better if it were in the bottom left corner of the kitchen...where everyone is coming/going. Keys, mail, etc. would get dropped there rather than making the trip through the kitchen...where the mail will probably be dropped on the island or cooktop counter since they're the first flat surfaces encountered!

Refrigerator: It would work much better in the original location where it's easily accessible from the Kitchen, Breakfast Room, & Great Room.

Pantry: This one is a matter of preference...would you rather have it better for putting groceries away or getting snacks? Either location will work for the Kitchen access, but for groceries it would be better located at the "bottom" of the kitchen and for snacks the "top" of the kitchen.

Dishwasher: You don't appear to have enough room to stand at the sink if the DW is open.

I know you're all for form over function...but I don't think you want to spend the next 10 years in a poorly functional kitchen. I strongly encourage you to rethink several things. Not the least of which is the location of the DW vs Trash. I also have to agree with RHome410, I think the general traffic patterns through the house serve more to segregate people and to make it difficult to get from one place to the other. To get anywhere easily, you almost have to go through the kitchen...which can be a problem with safety when cooking. With all the entertaining you do and guests all the time, you need to have a way to direct traffic away from your primary cooking and, IMHO, prepping zones.

BTW...when I meant having the entrances on the same side, I meant something like this.

Or this...

Double Ovens: You need approx 4' of wall space for a 33" corner oven cabinet. That's 4' from the corner. I think your cabinet guy is correct, you don't have the room b/c of the cooktop location....well, it might fit, but you won't have much room b/w the ovens & cooktop.

bronwynsmom - you are so right... I've got to calm down. I guess I'm freakin out cause I'm meeting with the cabinet guy this week, but really I've got a month before I have to decide for sure. ** inhale...exhale**

I have so appreciated the feedback and have tried to walk through the designs presented by all, and although I truly love aspects of all of them, buehl's and mom2lilenj's are my favorite. It's close to the original with some help in the function dept.

I'm going to rework with all the thoughts presented and see what I come up with...

I can't thank you guys enough for sharing your time and creativity with me :o)

I have spent the afternoon reworking the plan and have come up with two very similar versions:

My problem with this one is the message center seems very out of place. DH and I are considering using the DR for an office type room, so if I nix the MC the plan goes like this:

It does make for an odd corner over there by the DW, but I think it solves any major traffic dilemmas. Also, I may move the prep sink next to the cooktop.

Better? :o)

Typical work path is fridge to prep sink to prep counter to cooktop. Your island is between the fridge and the prep areas. Although the fridge is now more accessible to those from outside the kitchen, it's not too convenient for the worker bee. :-)

Yeah, I was just sitting here wondering if I'd be better off swapping the pantry and fridge... Or I could put the prep sink back in the island...

Like bmorepanics layout, very nice in my professional opinion
nice if you could open up entrance where closet/pantry is
to allow entrance to family room there
easier access if you have a finished basement or coming from upstairs into the kitchen? doesn't look like it would effect structural support

Either way (prep sink in island or not) I think I'd move the fridge away from the sink end...Maybe even in the middle of that wall. You have the opportunity with these plans to make the fridge wall a full wall of full ht cabs. You can probably fit in the oven, the microwave, the fridge, and the pantry...or at least 3 of the 4. The island could serve as the landing area for all of those, as could the counter that you show now with MC or DO.

I'd face the message center out on one end of that wall, facing the office or the breakfast room, whichever is most convenient for how you'll use it, so that it can be accessed from outside of the kitchen. Unless you have a specific plan for it that contradicts what I'm about to say, you can probably get away with having the message center at only 12-18" deep.

I like the first one of the two new layouts better, but I would suggest moving the DW to the other side of the sink and putting the trash in the island.

To make the fridge more convenient to the cooktop you could swap the fridge and wall ovens. But then the fridge is less convenient to the great room and breakfast. To me the island is kind of small for a prep sink, but if you did swap the fridge then you would need some sort of sink on that side.

Most of your meals are in the Breakfast Room and the Great Room is on the same end....I think the refrigerator would be better placed on the north end of the kitchen than the south end. The middle might also work, but definitely not, IMHO, the south end.

If most of the traffic comes in via the garage thru the kitchen, I think the closer you have the "drop zone" to that kitchen entrance the better chance you'll have of family/friends actually using the MC for that purpose rather than the island or other counter. Facing it out is a good idea....that way no matter which way you go thru the Kitchen (most common) or thru the DR/Office it will still be easily accessed.

If you decide not to go with all tall cabinets on the west wall, perhaps you could put the prep sink there....but it would be in the main path thru the Kitchen, so I don't recommend it.