I have to start off by saying how excited I am, I have been reading these boards for several years and now I am actually going to be starting my own kitchen!! Ok, now that that's out of the way I'll give you a little background on our family, why our current kitchen isn't working for us, and what we think our options are. :-)

We are a 2 working parent family with 2 young children (5 and 2) and a dog. I do all of the prepping/cooking and my husband does the dishes. Both girls love to help me cook and bake and usually I have at least one of them sitting on the counter helping me. I cook about 6 times/week, although during the week it is easier/quicker dinners while weekends are usually longer/more elaborate. We entertain frequently from just a couple of people (my MIL and grandmother in-law come for dinner every Wednesday) to larger get togethers (8-20 people probably 8-10 times/year) to really big parties (30-50 people around 5-6 times/year). We seem to be the house where everyone gathers. :-) I do the majority of the cooking for all of the parties/get togethers as well, I just love to cook/bake! We use our dining room pretty much every time we have people over except for the wednesday dinner with the in-laws and whenever the weather is nice we use the paver patio that is right outside the kitchen.

So, I've uploaded the downstairs floorplan of our house from our builders website and it's pretty close to what is actually here... Our kitchen island is larger than what is shown in the floorplan, both longer and wider, and it curves which allows us to have 3 chairs there. We use the "living room" as a playroom and the "study" we call Buddy's room (our dog) because it has his beds and toys in it... It also has the toy kitchen as overflow from the playroom because we couldn't fit it all in.

Here are the things that aren't working for us:

1. The cleaning zone is on top of the prep zone, which means that my husband and I are constantly in each others way when he is doing dishes and I am trying to get dinner ready, which is pretty much every day. It drives us crazy.

2. The connection from the kitchen to the dining room. It is way too small and is right next to the pantry/refrigerator so whenever I need to get into the pantry or refrigerator it blocks the doorway to/from the dining room which is a problem EVERY TIME we have people over.

3. The kitchen island isn't working for us... It's not big enough, it only seats 3 which never seems to be enough when we have other families over and people want to sit at the island and chat with me while I'm making dinner, and when we have large parties it becomes difficult to get by if people are sitting at the island because we have a large refrigerator.

4. We don't have enough refrigerator or pantry space. At our last house we had a very large walk in pantry, which I miss very much. Now we have a reach in pantry and a very small pantry cabinet, but they are both filled past max capacity. We also have a small refrigerator in the garage that has drinks (soda, beer, bottled water, juice boxes, etc) but whenever we have parties it is a struggle to get all of the food into one of the refrigerators. I would LOVE to have a very large built-in refrigerator.

5. The playroom is always a mess and is the first thing that people see when they come in the house. At the very least I would want to add some built-ins to help organize everything and have a place for them to go. I know that this is semi-temporary though as the kids will grow up and we won't have this problem forever.

So, I'll try to upload my ideas that I mocked up in excel to show you better what I was thinking, but we basically think we have 2 options to expand the kitchen space.

1. The first is to knock out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, make a really long kitchen with a really long kitchen island, move the dining room to the front of the house where the playroom (living room) is now, then put an addition on to the back of the house (behind where the dining room is now which will be attached to the new expanded kitchen) which we would use as the playroom. I'm worried this will make the kitchen TOO large though.

2. The second is to expand the kitchen by pushing the back wall out about 6 feet or so. The problem here is our paver patio. We don't want to lose 6 feet of it and we're guessing that they'd actually probably have to take the whole thing out to put an addition on here, and since we love it and use it all the time we wouldn't want to lose it, so we'd definitely need to have it rebuilt if we do this... Because of this, this option could actually end up being more expensive even though it add less square footage to the house.

We are meeting with the first designer/builder on Friday, and I'm sure they'll have ideas/opinions for us, but since I have learned so much from the Gardenweb community and respect your opinions so much I wanted to see what your thoughts/advice were first. Thank you so much!!