my kitchen is a blank slate - help?

15 years ago

I'm copying mountainmusing and hoping someone might want to play kitchen designer and tackle my kitchen plan! I've cleared everything out of it and also filled in the adjacent areas so you know where the kitchen is in relation to the other nearby rooms. I also used gray shaded walls to indicate those that can be removed or altered. We're open to reconfiguring the bathroom/side hall/coat closet area, but we have to have a bathroom somewhere and want to maintain an entry into the kitchen from the center hall. (Note that the bathroom has a beautiful leaded glass window, so I want to avoid covering it up.)

I've already ordered my appliances, so the design has to work with these items:

36" gas rangetop

Frigidaire stainless fridge/freezer "twins," although there's a chance we may be switching these to Electrolux Icons before they ship. I believe they are the same size - 32" apiece

30" microwave drawer

30" double wall oven

24" dishwasher

Here are my other needs:

We homeschool and currently use the sewing room as a school office. We have to have somewhere for our books and materials that can be closed off. We have been planning to adapt our coat closet for this (floor-to-ceiling shelves on two walls), but we're open to other ideas. We use the dining room and sunroom primarily for school. We've tried keeping the school materials in the sunroom, but our little ones kept getting into it because it couldn't be closed off during non-school time. It drove us all bonkers. ;o)

The space has to include a washer and dryer (Electrolux stackable front-loaders, which I've already ordered), and I don't want to have to look at them all the time. :o)

Our cabinets are going to be stacked to the top of our 9.5 ft ceiling, so we'll have lots of storage space for stuff I don't use all the time, but I *have* to have a sizable pantry for food. We have 12 kids, and this is an absolute necessity. Along with that, our new dining table is being built and is 10 feet long, so we really can't reduce the size of the dining room.

And in the "wants" category:

An island with some seating

More openness between the kitchen and dining room, since the dining room will be our only family eating space.

A bank of some kind of more formal-looking cabinetry for storing/displaying china, or maybe a free-standing hutch

Thanks in advance for any help! :o)
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Comments (10)

allison1888
15 years ago
It's beyond my layout skills to do the design, but I've had good luck at places like Home Depot or KDA. They've got the software to lay it out and you can always change it from there to get more creative. I would have suggested doing the layout before buying the appliances, but hopefully it will all come together. I think Merillat cabinetry has an online drawing tool-- worth checking out. Good luck!

Here is a link that might be useful: kitchen planning tips
farmhousebound
15 years ago
bumping up for layout gurus!
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laxsupermom
15 years ago
How low do your windows go in the kitchen and the sunroom?
Buehl
15 years ago
I assume the unlabeled rectangle is the kitchen....

On my monitor, the only walls that seem to be just slightly lighter than others are the walls b/w the DR & Kitchen and b/w the Sewing Room and Kitchen & DR...is that correct?

Where else are you flexible? Windows moved/changed? Doors moved/changed (inside or out)? Can rooms be swapped/re-purposed (e.g., swap DR & Kitchen)?

Some doorways are not marked, how wide are they?

One of my first thoughts is to use the Sewing Room for the Pantry + School Storage (2 separate rooms), but I'll have to study it more to be sure you will have a place for conducting school if you do that...

OT somewhat...but, do you have a Mud Room in your Garage? If not, have you thought of adding one w/this remodel? If you were willing to add an addition into the backyard and give up one side of the Sunroom, you could have a big enough Mud Room for all 12 children to have their own cubby/drop zone. It could also be smaller & not take away from the Sunroom, but I was thinking "big"!
bmorepanic
15 years ago
Conceptuals: one mostly in existing space and one that reconfigures the walls and all.

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worldmom
Original Author
15 years ago
buehl - yes, the big rectangle is the kitchen, and you were right about the gray walls. There isn't much contrast there - sorry about that!

To answer some of your other questions, our home is 100 year old brick, so moving windows would be very difficult. The sunroom was originally a porch, and it was enclosed sometime in the thirties. It is not well-insulated and would be extremely expensive to convert into a kitchen, plus we have dreams of opening it back up one day. (It's a beautiful two-story, columned bump out on the back of the house).

We are knocking out a wall in the kitchen that currently forms our mudroom (a six-foot wide "hall" from the back door to the sewing room wall) in order to enlarge the kitchen. As much as I like having a mud room, I would rather have a bigger kitchen. We are going to have hooks for coats in the side hall, and one base cabinet nearest the back door will have cubbies inside for shoes. I'm very strict on the no-leaving-your-junk-by-the-back door-rule as it is, because as you can imagine, 14 junk of 14 people adds up quickly! ;o) We do plan to build a storage area in the garage, right outside the garage entry, which can be used for coats and boots in the winter.

Doorways - back yard door is 36", garage door is 32," and side hall doorway is only 29.5" Doors could be moved on the inside, like the side hall and/or bathroom/coat closet.

I've thought about switching the dining room and kitchen spaces, but the large window seat would take up a huge chunk of the available wall space. I'm not sure how to work around that.

laxsupermom - the windows in kitchen have cabinets under them now, and they are about 38" from the floor. The sunroom windows are 36" from floor, but as I said above, using the sunroom for kitchen space would be an expense we can't afford right now.

bmorepanic - we can't take space from the garage for the pantry, etc., because the garage is so narrow (plus we drive a 15-passenger van and our "small car" is a Suburban!) but your second layout hits on something I've been toying around with. It has really inspired me and I appreciate you taking the time to draw it out! I love that I could have a "mini-mudroom." :o) I'd have to figure out where to get a substantial pantry and laundry space in there, but I like this idea! Thank you!

If anyone else has any ideas, but please keep 'em coming!
rosie
15 years ago
I love your basic layout, Worldmom. It looks like a wonderful home. But one thing that jumps out at me is that I'd want to extend the sunroom slightly to create direct passage to and from the kitchen, because I suspect that's where I'd be spending most of my time.
laxsupermom
15 years ago
bmore's second layout looks really good. If you eliminated the banquet in the corner and extended the storage room wall all the way across the room, you could have a great big pantry/laundry/storage space. It would, however, wall off the only windows in the kitchen.
remodelfla
15 years ago
I tried playing with your layout. Not to scale I"m sure as I was just able to paste your drawing into powerpoint and couldn't really read dimensions. Just trying a tweak on bmores great idea.
rhome410
15 years ago
I've made some adjustments to Bmore's plan to try to fit pantry, laundry, and maybe that desk you wanted. It's not a pantry like you had in the other plan, but if you prefer this layout, maybe you could still get some storage in by the washer/dryer stack?

Are you Ok with the hutch facing the kitchen?

I switched the refer and freezer labels according to how they sit together, and the handles according to what side they come on, since you can't switch them. The fridge up against a wall, as shown, will only be able to open less than 90 degrees.

my kitchen is a blank slate - help?

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