This is an ancient thread. (Hello from 2017!!) I wanted to briefly chime in for anyone perusing this thread for information regarding an older home that has like victoriajane and another poster which has lots of entryways and confusing layouts for walls. I have chosen for my guesthouse to have what is called an 'unfitted kitchen' It is well used in England. It's more like armoires and dressers look. Take a gander on the internet. Bing.com seems to have better photo selections for this than Google, FYI. I wish everyone the very best on their journey to a happy and productive kitchen and home.

Adding on is more expensive, and the kitchen is the highest price per square foot of any part of the house, plus you are in a more expensive area -- but that still seems high to me. Keep in mind that it can cost nearly as much to move something a little as to move it a lot. Same thing with adding a little -- The labor is nearly the same, the permits and the problems are nearly thesame, and only some of the materials increase. if you do rethink your approach, it pays to take the time to really study your space and options -- think outside the box and conventional approaches. We bought out house planning only on replacing counters and appliances, but 4 years later, we ripped it all out. We moved a cooktop out of the island and across that island from the sink -- made possible because we were able to install a prep sink. We also took out a corner pantry and a huge overhead light box. The kitchen feels about 50% larger and functions so much better, but we didn't change the footprint. We couldn't -- there was really nowhere we could go, so we improved the same space and got a lot more out of it. If you want to post what you have with what you need and want, I'm sure you'll get a lot of great pointers on working within the available space. Something to think about....

Hi florantha, I know exactly what you mean by lots of space but no space! That exactly describes my home. In fact, I don't really have a space for a desk right now because of that. I wish I had my computer so I could upload some pictures (I'm using my iPad right now), but I will just have to use words to describe my space for now: When you walk into my house, you walk right into my kitchen, which is 13ft x 12ft. So if you think of a square, the front door is on the bottom side at the far right. The right side is a wall, along which is the recessed pantry, and this wall stops at the end of the 12ft. There is a walkway in front of you, and the rest of the bottom side (to the left of the door) has the fridge and a short counter. The left-hand wall has that counter continuing from the corner, then a sink under a window, then a counter over the dishwasher, and then a wall oven with microwave and short cabinets over it. There is no fourth wall ahead of you - the tile just transitions to wood floor and there is a wood beam overhead to divide the rooms. So if you walk to the end of the tile, you are in the left half of a rectangular room, and our dining set is in the same room at your right. So, the dining room is a 15ft 7" by 24ft rectangle, and my current kitchen is like a square under the long left side of that rectangle. The dining set fits into the right-hand 12ft stretch of dining room, and the left-hand side (that my current kitchen opens onto) is useless empty space right now. So I'm pushing my kitchen straight backwards into that space, and my current kitchen will be the mudroom/entry. That was probably clear as mud, but it's the best I can do for now, sorry! The place where my wall oven and microwave are, will house a tall cabinet which will contain the stacked washer/dryer. The sink und the window will be replaced with a utility sink and keep the short counters at either side - I'm hoping to make that all soapstone. So the will be both top and bottom cabinets at either side of the sink (and under it), and I was thinking of having those cabinets and the tall one housing the W/D similar to the kitchen cabinets. The fridge and short counter, to the left of the front door, will be replaced by the coat stand. So that's where I'm agonizing over having the different stains. They would be right up again each other in that corner... Would it look terrible if they were different, as I described in my post above? I'll be putting in a long countertop between the two rooms to separate the mudroom from the kitchen, leaving a 4th walkway from the door straight to the kitchen, and adding an open shelf right under the ceiling beam as well, to separate the spaces. I figure that can be a handy folding area as necessary, or we can use the dining room table. I don't sort, really, and my pantry is big (7th x 2.5th) so if need be, I can shove the hamper in there out of sight when company comes. Hampers stay in rooms/closets until I do laundry, so I don't think it will be a big deal? And the ironing board can go in the pantry too, with one if those wall retainers which holds the iron up above. I never hang clothes and I suppose I could always use the coat hooks and a hnagerrs for rare occasions, too? Does this all make sense or have I created mass confusion by now?

Before I launch of into the ether, LavenderLass..... Your husband is doing OK now, and y'all are over and out of perils and pitfalls that befell y'all? This is gonna be a fairly long ramble, 'cause I’m really good at such things, and I sorta kinda in a way wanna brag about it all anyway..... We started on our new place at the end of this past June. Well, if you count the well and septic as starting, it was the first week of June We have a nice 1888 sq ft house on a couple of acres surrounded by a couple of acres of county owned "Storm water run off ROW" right down town here in the middle of the big city, Well, OK, with the "finished basement" I reckon it's really more like 3456 sq ft, but around here nobody counts a finished basement as part of the house. It's kind of just expected. We have always had a place way out in the sticks since we first got together 33 years ago. We had a really nice almost 2.5 miles off the road down a private ROW in the middle of an Appalachian foothills hollow out of the way almost 40 acres that we bought when the kids started middle school and we decided I was keeping the "new" job and that we would move closer to the real world than our 105 acres in the middle nowhere Tennessee was. Then a moron in a great big hurry passed a school bus on a curve and there I was. To make a real long story short enough to bear, everybody but me thought that being a "Neurological disaster area" that far off the road with no neighbors and cell phone service only if you're in the right spot is totally unreasonable. My wife said she would be OK with me finding a place just as country just half as close to home (which would have been 13.75 miles) and half as far off the road with a neighbor or two...... Which of course no one thought I would ever be able to do. So, I asked everyone everywhere that I came across and looked and looked and drove down every un-named pig path around and at last found a very nice 17.3 acres located almost right where three counties meet right in the very middle of the NC Piedmont. Unbelievably rural for considering its' being just 7.5 miles from the square in the booming metropolis of Mocksville, NC. and pretty much equi-distant to Salisbury, Lexington, Statesville, and Wake Forest University/Baptist Medical Centerin Winston-Salem. And it's just 47 miles to the terminal entrance at Piedmont-Triad International Airport in Greensboro, NC. and 67 miles to the terminal entrance at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport in Charlotte, NC too. C was at first in shock that I actually found such a place and was a tough sell on me getting us this, but she finally realized that I was never going to shut up about it said if I could swing the deal that she would sign her name on the dotted line right next to mine. Everybody concerned, the people selling it, the real estate agent, the neighbors, the county folks, the people down the road, everybody, said we were never going to get it at what I was willing to pay. Everybody, except me of course, had little enough faith in my unfathomable charm and and bull dog (though many call it bull something else) tenacity to think that I would ever be able to talk us into making such a deal. But, I DID! And so C just like she said she would ended up signing her pretty little signature right next to mine and it's since Dec 2013, it's ours..... Very private at a little over 1.3 miles off the pavement across three cattle grates through pasture and woods down an excellent shared private drive with one neighbor 500 - 600 feet distant on each side of the home-site. A school teacher couple with no kids on one side, and a retired serviceman and wife on the other, and an absolutely palatial estate behind across the river. Due to the location on an oxbow of the river, and being in a three county "Designated Agricultural District", that's all the neighbors there will be. And the "Designated Agricultural Area" is bigger than this whole one town one high school county of maybe 40,000 is, and near as I can tell has a population density of 32 per square mile, which for east of the Appalachians, especially in the Ga/SC/NC/Va Piedmont, means it's virtually empty. Sort of a pie shaped property with almost 2100' on the S Yadkin River. From a +75' bluff above the river down to several hundred feet of actual real sandy beach right down along and with two great big and deep swimming holes including one with a great big rock sticking up right in the middle for an excellent diving platform into its' 12 - 13 foot deep hole, with 300' fronting the "drive", +3000' along the longest side of the property with +1200' along the "opposite" side. And the river is from beginning to end one of the very few NC state "Protected Watershed"s and there willnever be any kind of development adjacent to it, no industrial plants, no sewer plants no nothing except woods and farmland. C had serious doubts about the rational of buying this place, but, the chances that anybody could now talk her into selling bit and buying something else, are substantially less than zero..... Approx. 5.5 acres of very nice and healthy pasture/field - with close to 12 acres in large mature hardwood's from level river-front floodplain to gently sloping to fairly steep hillside. And several acres of those hardwoods down in the flood plain that will one day make another several acres of beautiful shaded summertime pasture too. We have us a new permitted and tested and approved 282' well with static water at 60', and a new permitted and tested and approved septic system installed. We bought a really odd 14 X 68 half of a double wide with an odd 2 separate pitches roof that we stripped out from end to end and is now in the process of being completely and totally ever so slowly redone by ME formerly 2 bed/2 bath - now being turned into a luxurious 960 sq ft 1 bath, 1 bedroom with a small alcove, an entrance-hallway/laundry/closet, a 9'6" X 13' "spare" room (for ME!), and a large sewing room and walk in closet. VERY rustic in the outside appearance as the neighbors are like minded and none of us are concerned with what the drive by traffic that will never be, nor are any of us about impressing the county tax folks or anybody else except for the Great Blue Herons, Beavers, Bald Eagles, Deer, Turkey, Fox, Bobcats. Rabbits, Raccoons, Skunks, Possums, Wood Ducks, and according to one local lunatic, Bigfoot too, that are all in abundance here. A wonderful retirement place for us, our now grown and hopefully permanently gone kids, our 5 dogs, horses, cattle, goats, and chickens, and our peace of mind too..... You could look and look, but it's it's absolutely no exaggeration to say that no one will ever find another "almost like being in the mountains" place like this anywhere in all of the Ga/SC/NC/Va Piedmont. OK. The youngest of the great big Great Pyrenees wanting to go out and play in the snow, I am done with my brag..... As next week is the first time this season since early November that we'll see temperatures hit 60F, work is about to once again, begin in earnest. And regular reports of perils and "progress" and pic's too are soon to follow.