Honestly, I'm confused. How big is your pantry closet? 36" long x 24" deep? Or is it 36" long by 36" deep and you want to narrow the depth to 24" and put a 12" deep cabinet BEHIND it? I cannot picture this at all! Do you have cabinets next to the fridge right now or just a deep pantry closet? OK, well, you only have a coat closet if you completely get rid of the pantry closet, therefore I say that you must have at a minimum a 24"x24" utility / broom closet. As far as an actual "pantry" goes, it's hard to say without a floorplan. A well designed pantry is invaluable, a poorly designed pantry is a major waste of space. If you have a small kitchen and lack counterspace then you may be better off without a pantry, but usually that would be replacing it with 24" deep base cabs and 12" deep uppers. You still need storage space - the equivalent of what your pantry held at least. A "pantry" stores food. A "closet" stores non-food items such as cleaning supplies and, well, yes, dog food too. A pantry can be replaced with the equivalent in cabinets (drawer base - regular base cabs are just as bad as a poorly designed pantry). Food and non-food items should have separate storage spaces - otherwise you end up with a mess as you apparently have right now (as do I - my pantry is poorly designed and at the opposite end of the dining room diagonally across from the kitchen - I don't know what the builder was thinking). Note that a 24" deep pantry only works if it is a pull-out, otherwise 12-15" shelves are the way to go.

What do I store in our pantry? Extra flour, sugar, etc - baking supplies. Extra canned stuff - we don't use a whole lot of it, but some canned stuff, like tomato sauce, is useful. Packaged soups. Cereal (my dh eats cornflakes every morning). Paper products - TP and paper towels. Extra cleaning supplies. We have an extra freezer - I freeze fruit and veggies - we grow a lot and I also buy it at the farm stands.I plan on starting to freeze milk this year. I prefer to freeze stuff rather than can it, so the freezer gets used! I'll be using our pantry/utility room storage more when we move to our new house since we'll be farther to affordable grocery stores than we were when we lived in our old house. When I go to the city, I'll mostly get stuff when it's on sale - buy 3 extra bags of flour if I see it at a great price, for instance. I also store extra kitchen equipment in the pantry - I have a food dehydrator that I store there, also canning supplies (I *do* can jelly). The pantry is my warehouse, I guess! I keep daily supplies in the kitchen, when we're running low on baking powder (for instance), I grab another can from the pantry, where I probably have at least 3 more cans - that I got on sale - stored. We don't have a pantry right now. It's temporary, thankfully.

Do you have an elevation drawing of that stairwell in the living area? Seems the space under the stair landings could be better incorporated in your effort to locate the powder room, or at least the hot water, accessing from the closet by the entry and moving the sloset to the living room side. On another subject, am I mis-reading or are there bi-fold doors by the tub in the main bath? Looks like there are windows in the WIC. I would rather have windows in the bath and walk through the closet to get there than have to walk through the bath to retrieve clothing; not convenient if there is someone using the bath. That pantry at the foot of the stairs looks like a good spot for a stacking WD. I'd want it configured to vent out an exterior wall, using pullout pantries in the kitchen so that space could be the laundry. But first I'd move that big bath's footprint to the deck end of the space so the closet could be in the master.

Hood/MW...If you don't need a MW, then definitely get a real hood! OTR MWs are, at best, mediocre hoods and MWs and, at worst, lousy hoods (still OK MWs, not the best, though). I think a hood is definitely worth the money! What type of cooking do you do? If you don't do much high-heat cooking, stir-frying, etc., you won't need an extra powerful hood. Sink...I understand what you prefer, but a large sink base will rob you of much needed storage. If you think about it, a single-basin 24" will be as big as or bigger than any one of the bowls in a 2-basin sink. I really think this is one place where you should re-consider. If you add another foot to the sink basin to shoehorn in a double-basin sink, you will need to reduce cabinet storage by 12", and that's a lot of storage to lose in a small Kitchen, whether you realize it or not, especially base cabinet storage. Another consideration is that with a large sink basin, you will be crowding the range on one side and/or the seating on the other side. If you expand to the right, you will now have no workspace b/w the sink and range and you will be standing in front of the range while working at the sink. You will also need to be careful about leaving enough room so you don't interfere with the range on one side and the sink basin's doors on the other. If you expand to the left, you will be pushing the DW toward the table and the seating. DW...it's an 18" DW. With just the two of you, I think you will find that an 18" DW will be enough. In the layouts, I was trying to maximize both storage and counterspace. Corners...Regarding the corners, I should have explained. I voided out the corners, there are no corner cabinets. Why? Base corners...IKEA corner susan cabinets use up 38" on each wall, leaving you with almost no other cabinetry between the range and sink. What there would be, would be pretty useless. Upper corners...IKEA only offers a corner cabinet with a diagonal front, which I find surprising as it's such an outdated look and not very functional. (IKEA is usually more "current".) Those corner uppers are almost useless as they are so deep with a relatively small door. If they offered an "easy reach", I would have recommended that instead of voiding, but they don't Blind corner cabinets, both upper and lower, are probably the worst solution to a corner and I would never recommend them. (I've dealt with them in apartments and my MIL has both in her apartment -- things are always getting lost in them.) Even with a(n) (expensive) swing out, they waste a lot of space and you run the risk of something falling off when opening/closing the swing out. Unlike today's corner susans that have walls that follow the contour of the shelves so nothing could possibly fall off, blind corners are wide open. If something does fall off, you cannot close them without retrieving the item...and it's difficult for an adult to do so. You need a small child around to retrieve the fallen item! The best option for storage for this small a Kitchen, IMO, is to void the corners, add the bit of needed filler and use the 11" or so left over to the cabinets on each side of the corner - drawer base for the 24" and pullout or shelves for the 12". Between the studs pantry...the depth would depend on how much space you have between the walls and how "finished" you want it to be. The 6-inch depth you say you have is actually deeper than most such pantries as they use the smaller depth normally between walls (usually 3 inches or so). 6" of depth can be very useful. If you open up the wall behind the ironing board, you may gain another 3" to have 9" deep shelves -- definitely useful! The "sweet spot" for pantry shelves is 12", and you would have close to that. In fact, I might even recommend putting this type of pantry in a couple of locations. You could even make a "between the studs" utility "closet" for broom, mop, etc. In other locations you would only get the 3" or so, but that's still deep enough for can storage, spices, cleaning supplies, broom, etc. Let me see if I can find some pictures to show you.