I wouldn't plan a kitchen around 1970s ovens if you are planning on replacing in a different size. What would you do if they die next year? It's going to be hard to make room for 30" ovens if you only leave space for the 24" ones now. I do like the peninsula much better with the new plan - it will keep the traffic flow out of the kitchen which is nice.

Have you considered making your kitchen/dining an eat-in farmhouse style kitchen? Your planned dining room looks very cramped and as your family grows you might appreciate having a comfortable amount of space to walk around the table and not have to climb over people to get in/out. We do all our homeschool work at the dining table if you do as well I think that's all the more reason to have room for a ten foot table and 3-5 feet walk walk around room. In the drawing below there's a dishwasher-clean up sink-base cab-fridge-pantry on the back wall and prep sink-base cab-36"cooktop-base cab-30" double ovens on the other wall. Just food for thought...

PS - One of my most beloved mentors has seven boys and homeschooled them all. She's amazing and I'm thinking you probably are too!

Thank you so much for your feedback!

lharple, I agree that the room should be there for the 30 inch ovens, which is why there is so much space between the tall cabinet and the wall. This way we can build the future cabinet to fit whatever ovens we end up getting. We already have the cabinet and over cabinet now, which saves dh work and expense in the short term but when we replace the ovens, the tall cabinet can move towards the wall, and my husband can build the oven cab and over fridge cabinet then instead of now. There won't be any disturbance to the rest of the kitchen, at least that is the plan. This was actually a big motivator in pushing us to gut completely because I kept feeling like I couldn't change or improve anything because of those darn ovens! What if they died?

I am very glad to have some feed back regarding the flipping of the peninsula!

Benjesbride, Thank you, but I am pretty sure I am not amazing, lol, but we are never bored here, that is for certain! I do like a traditional farmhouse kitchen, but I don't think we could get rid of the support beam between the two spaces, and even taking it back to the outside wall with the small partition wall would be quite expensive since there is a return in that wall that also feeds from the upper level. Whenever we considered an option likethat, we always felt the room would still feel divided oddly and not quite down the middle.

We have a very large screened in porch that makes a sort of T against the kitchen and dining room. Half of that enormous window looks onto the porch, and that is where the sliders in the dining room lead, and our potager garden fills in the area around the three sides of that porch. Anyway, our "down the road" plan is to close in that porch to make a long, generous dining room. Perhaps then, we will consider moving the kitchen to the dining room space and making the current kitchen a walk through pantry that also opens to the new dining room or making the current dining room more of a keeping room with a sitting area or smaller table or banquette.

I have also periodically considered putting the pantry storage on either side of the window in the dining room and making the bench more of a banquette style against the wall. Sarah Susankah uses the banquette option a lot in her designs, and it seems so efficient. But then I think of how much it would always require people to climb over others to enter and leave instead of coming in from the back, and I'm just not sure.

As it is, we have a second table in our family room (down a level from the kitchen), and that is where most of the spreading out of school or art materials happens. It took some finagling to get the second table comfortably in that space while still keeping things cozy and not too cluttered (we like reading on the couch), but I think we finally found it!

I'm not sure anyone wanting to use the bar seats behind the wall. Maybe you can do a drop leaf counter like this next to the 30" cab on the peninsula to be used during prep or for 1 or 2 seats.

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A wall mount drop leaf counter may be considered to give you extra prep/landing spot in front of the window.

You can move the green cabs behind the dining table to the wall separating the kitchen from the DR or have a tall cab there.

Wow, you’ve done so well with your space constraints! The plan that stacked
the ovens on the hidden wall next to the window has my favorite aesthetic, but
for flow, I would definitely go with
shifting the peninsula to the left as you have in your current plan. That is a
bummer about the support beam near the window—no way to engineer that out of
the picture? I was really digging benjesbride’s all-in-one design! If not, I’m all about the drop leaf expansion
on the peninsula and beneath the kitchen window—excellent suggestions from Sena!

Yes, to sticking with a rangetop and double ovens—even though a full
range is space efficient, I hate bending down to an under-range oven and I’m
sure that sentiment will deep as I age. Personally,
I’d pass on a 2nd DW—I’ve been really chewing over the possibility
of a second one in my own kitchen today and talked it over with my husband tonight, but as I already mentioned in the thread
on my kitchen design [https://www.houzz.com/discussions/would-love-ideas-on-our-kitchen-plans-for-a-new-build-dsvw-vd~3762592[(https://www.houzz.com/discussions/would-love-ideas-on-our-kitchen-plans-for-a-new-build-dsvw-vd~3762592),
even with a big family, I think it’s easier to frequently cycle one DW than
juggle 2 (I hand-wash pots/cookie sheets/mixing bowls anyhow), and I’d definitely rather have the cabinet space in your
kitchen. So long as you have decent
sized aisles (which you do), I actually like back to back sink & stove and have
happily lived with that set-up—one easy pivot to work between them (just keep
the dishwasher out of the way or it gets congested—I’d keep the DW that is closer
to the fridge).

I’m a big fan of benches at rectangular tables and would suggest benches
on both sides of your table—I love benches with my kids: so easy to wipe clean
(instead of a million chair rungs), you can seat more at the table and, most
importantly, it creates more walk-space and sense of openness (esp if they are
going to be backing up to your peninsula stools). I was super in love with
banquettes and kept trying to incorporate them into my own design until one of
my friends (who also has a lot of kids) convinced me of how impractical they
are for more than 4 people—as I thought
about how much I dislike sitting at banquette booths at restaurants when
we have all our kids with us, I realized the climbing over people/feeling
trapped would drive me nuts….and if they are cushioned (which I think is
essential for comfort) they also collect a lot yucky crumbs and grime from kids!

Thank you!

Sena--I like the idea of a drop-leaf, both of them, though currently I keep a simple human trash can at the end of my peninsula and love that, and we have a clip on high chair on that side of the overhang in our current kitchen, which is one of my favorite things (no large high chair in our small space and a place for baby/toddler to watch mom work). I'd been wondering what my options might be for using that dead space under the window, and your examples are lovely. I had thought of a shelf with rounded sides and maybe even a stool, but the drop down makes a lot of sense. In our old kitchen, we had a counter break in front of a low window where we had a window seat but had a piece of butcher block we could use side bolts to span that space when the extra counter was needed, and it was so useful! I also agree that the space in front of the wall would be no one's favorite space to sit, and I have wondered about putting extra storage there, though with so many bodies, I can also imagine sitting in front of the wall being preferable to not having the seat. The gray cabinets were just there to sort of approximate the size and space of the buffet I already have and use. I should have labeled that better, so I can't move them as you suggest, but your point is well-taken.

Kawerkamp, It is helpful to have advice from someone else who readily understands our lifestyle. Your point about the second dishwasher is good, especially since my new plan bumps me to a 33 inch single basin from a 24 (another inheritance I actually love--from here on, I'd prefer the 24" single basin to a larger divided sink), which should make clean up easier, too. In the two dishwasher plan, I think I'd have to keep the dish towels in one of the drawers under the cooktop across the aisle (since I freed that drawer with the spice cabinet pull-out), and I know that would likely get old. I'll have to talk it over with dh again. He is the youngest of 12, and they never even had a dishwasher, and his mother insists she doesn't want one and never did, but I tend to think she is in denial, lol.

Oh, and now that I think about it, the second dishwasher at the wall has a 5 " gap between it and the wall, so I might be able to squeeze a whole 'nother 30" cabinet there without narrowing my opening too much (it is 39" now so 38" could work), and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Benjesbride, I just shared your plan with my husband, and he is very intrigued. I keep mulling it over myself, so we will definitely play around some more with your idea. It does seem a good long-term solution, an we've been discussing our options for it this morning. It might not be feasible, but it is a great idea.

You're welcome))

One other thing I forgot to mention. You can consider toe kick drawers for extra storage .

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I realized today when playing around with the farmhouse idea that the reason my dining room looked much more cramped on my plan than it feels in real life is because I put the wrong sized table in there! In the Ikea planner it gives the smallest dimensions of an expandable table when offering the choices but then places the fully extended version in your plans. I definitely cannot have a table more than 100 inches long in that space every day! I kept thinking those Ikea chairs must be terribly small to fit 4 on one side!

Here are a couple of pictures of it modified that will give a more accurate feel for the space as it currently is with the proposed pantry space added.

Dh and I studied my mock ups this evening, and we just aren't sure that the kitchen suits our home. It would be a really great kitchen in a farmhouse. I'm imagining something like the kitchen from Baby Boom with Diane Keaten or The Waltons as I said before, but we just aren't sure the scale and style would be quite right. I also have a lot of other things I'd like to do that I think would improve the livability of our home, and I just don't know that spending so much more on the kitchen to not do those things would really be the right thing.

The design I proposed is definitely in our budget and looks to increase functionality too, not just aesthetics. I am hoping that others might chime in on that aspect of things. I am leaning towards storage over the second dishwasher. I can fit that 30 inch cabinet in on the end between the sink and window wall, which is a boon for sure. The two I have are the storage workhorses of my current kitchen.

just to confirm... the kitchen proper is 96" deep?

And how wide are the narrow walls between the kitchen and dining?

And how much wall space is there between the lightswitch next to the slider and the perpendicular narrow wall?

And how much space between back wall and the entry at the top of the stairs?

Yes, 96 inches.

The wall close to the slider is 36" (31" to the current molding). On the other side near the foyer, the narrow wall is 12" (7" to the current molding). They are standard depth walls, though the molding is 5 inches.

The distance to the light switch is 11 3/4", 19.5" total to the door frame. The electrical is somewhat flexible as long as we can keep it to code since my husband can do it so we don't have the expense of labor involved in moving it.

And the distance from the back wall to the current molding on the door way is 53". With that molding gone and if we decide against any, it might buy another inch or two

One thing I had not mentioned is that is currently a pocket door, though not a very good one, always falling off the track, so it is rarely used as such. It is only 35 inches wide, though we hope that replacing the bulkier molding housing the slider will make it a full width door. The doorway to the dining room does not have molding and is taller, and we are hoping to make the two entries match and look symmetrical from the foyer (and also match the opening to the living room that also has no molding and is tall like the dining room). Anyway, that is one reason the opening to the kitchen next to the peninsula needs to be wide. Our current opening is 39", which is good, and I think we can comfortably go down to 38", but I hesitate to do any less just for ease of repairing and replacing appliances and such as needed. When that entrance was also a pocket door, we had to disassemble our new refrigerator at the time to get it in and only just made it!

I modified the plan slightly already based on the feedback I've received, inserting the 30" cabinet at the end to replace the second dishwasher, fixing the dining room table, and extending the bar area out to 18" after thinking that 12" works now because the boys are all young, but as they get bigger, even though they are of average size, we are more likely to want that extra depth for knees. Do I need to put together a new plan with these changes and add in the dimensions you asked for or is listing them here sufficient? I don't think I can edit my original post to put it there.

So one thing I keep going back and forth about when I look at the plan is the sink placement.

I have had mock ups with the dishwasher on the end, then the sink, then the two 30" cabinets side by side. This is better aesthetically to me with the sink more centered on the counter visible in the opening and it off-sets it somewhat so that it isn't directly across from the cooktop but makes a much more symmetrical, isosceles shaped work triangle, but I ultimately chose what I did because the thirty inch cabinet at the end will hold the silverware and dishes for setting the table and one could be unloading and putting away those dishes easily while someone else was working at the sink and easily accessing those dishes to set the table while others are working in the kitchen. I also felt that it allowed the space to be more readily used for entertaining and that the sink would not be so much in the way of those sitting at the counter on the other side.

However I can see the full 60 inches together on the inside of the kitchen, to the right of the sink also being good as a prepping and baking area, and I could keep the cutlery and dishes in the cabinet between the ovens and cooktop, which if the 60 " space is the primary prepping space, it is likely the landing spot for cooking would be to the left of the cooktop instead of the right, meaning table-setters would not disturb the cook. I'm not sure if I currently land on the right side of the cooktop because that is the direction I am coming from (currently do all prepping on peninsula on that side of the kitchen) or because my large burner on the front is on the right-hand side, though I'm often using both large burners, the one on the front and the back.

Here is a scenario with the 30" on the end and the sink between it and the dishwasher.

do you really need counter seating right next to the table? you could put 15" base cabinets all across the peninsula for storage and skip the pantries in the dining room. We have limited space for our kitchen/dining --about 12'x17'--we opted for a peninsula with no seating to free up for space around the dining table and its nice.

It is worth considering for sure. My kids do spend an awful lot of time at the counter. I don't really serve meals there except for the baby/toddler, whose high chair clips on there, a seemingly small thing that is hugely functional!--and I am expecting another baby, so it will see another few years of use. But people hang out there while others are working, observing and/or helping. If the stools weren't there, I imagine that the chairs from the table would be pulled up to it for standing. But, it comes in handy often when we have guests, making for good overspill seating from the table. I find it most useful for when little ones want to hang out near mom while she's working but not get underfoot. They so often want to be able to see what is going on.

We do plan on recessing the pantry storage area (and not use Ikea 15" cabinets but custom make them to fit the space), so they should not come into the room more than 9 inches or so. This is why I pushed them back into the wall in my Ikea plan; it was the closest I could aproximate. We thought 8-9 inches into the room would make them as unintrusive as possible. Something like this, but with solid doors.

The shallow storage is pretty, but if it's not there can your whole dining room be open to the living room across the front entry?

Not without losing the coat closet on the backside of it and any semblance of an entry. Here is a floorplan of the main level of our home.

Although the extra
cabinets around the back-side of the peninsula would be nice, when we
entertain, I really appreciate being able to throw some of the young kids at
the island to eat, while the rest of us are at the table (plus the kids always
want to be where I am right at the island)—that’s valuable seating. I
think the shallow pantry cabinets are beautiful. I would be tempted to open the wall to the
dining (and wall off the current dining entry and put pantry cabinets there
(puts all your storage more part of the kitchen, and would really give you an open front entry feel), but
it totally depends how you use the coat closet—if it stores a lot of stuff and
your own coats/backpacks (i.e., functions as your own mudroom closet), keep it
there; if it’s just for guests, you could open that wall up and mount coat hooks where
the new walled-off area would be.

P.S. Re. your decision whether to consolidate the 60" of counterspace to the right of your sink (closer to the window) or to the left (end of peninsula), the support wall makes me strongly prefer your original version where the bulk of the counter space is to the left of the sink. Although the alternative visually centers your sink through the cut out, I think function has to trump aesthetics: your counter at the peninsula end will be much deeper and I naturally gravitate to landing or prepping at the largest expanse of counter space available (re. of whether it's to my left/right or across the aisle--I hate the feeling of working against a wall)--chopping things, working with dough, etc. Also will make the eating area at the bar feel more ample (and if kids are doing homework/crafts, less splashing from the sink). Seems that it would also be much easier for folks to unload the DW/set the table without getting into your space if you're working at the sink. Whichever you choose, remember to put the disposal in the side of the sink that's closest to the bigger counterspace where you'll be chopping, etc. so that you can just sweep it all into the sink from the counter.

Thank you, Kawerkamp. I think you are right that function is definitely better in my original. I am planning on a single basin sink, but we don't have a disposal anyway since we are on septic. I suppose I technically *could* have a disposal with septic, but it isn't recommended, and though we had one in our old kitchen, after 5 years, we don't really miss it. That does bring to mind, though, how I keep our garbage at the end of the peninsula run in a step-open trash can, and that is another strong argument for function over form in putting the prep space on that end! I really missed my pull-out garbage for a long time, but now that I have that can, I have grown to appreciate the space it is able to use since I can make the opening that much smaller practically but not permanently. In typing this, I now realize that it will mean my garbage can facing the entrance rather than tucked away as it is currently. Bummer.

Oh well, I think I'm just going to have to make function over form my mantra and start chanting it whenever I start deviating too much from the practical. It isn't as if the sink looks *bad* in the practical layout, it just looks "better" in the other. I had really wanted two pendant lights over the peninsula, but I think that might look strange if the sink isn't centered, but my husband wasn't crazy about the pendant lights anyway (he thinks they'll get in the way), so it is probably a sign, lol.

Funny you should say that about moving the doorway. I had moved it as you describe just this morning in another mock up that didn't work out but not with this one. I do use that little closet like a mud room. It is PACKED with hooks on the door for kid coats, drawers up the middle for everyone's shoes, etc... But, if I could put a coat closet in the middle of the foyer between the two entrances instead of to the side, it might work. We've wanted to change the wall between the living room and foyer in that section to a half wall and column like one of the other homes on our street with our floorplan has (and is original), and that would definitely open up the two spaces nicely without it being too open. I really think it is most likely going to make the foyer too cluttered, more than it already is, but I should see if my husband will put it all in sketch up so we can better visualize it.

And...now that I look at my floorplan again, I think it probably looks like the opening to the living room is when you first walk in, but the thick part is actually the opening and the black line the wall. I did that quickly, and I was not consistent, and I see now it is confusing.

Bentwood Drive Residence Kitchen 1 · More Info

If you don't want the trashcan front and center when people enter the kitchen, how about putting it under the sink? We're able to fit a big trash under ours and still have plenty of space for all the rest of the junk I keep under the sink. Like this: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dLz9YAcxnUo/T1bnG4LqQAI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/qT6wwoaV8A8/s400/IMG_0433%255B2%255D.jpg