The problem w/the short sides, whether ROTS or drawers, is that things can fall off them when they're in motion or while getting something else out/off them. With the higher sides (close to the height of the drawer front, in the case of drawers), the sides will stop things from falling. Open shelves/ROTS...my personal opinion is that I don't like them. I don't like having my pantry items all out in plain sight like that...assuming the above pic is in the kitchen & not a pantry or side room somewhere. To me, and remember this is just my personal opinion & YMMV, it looks unfinished...but, keep in mind that I also do not like open shelves, so it's probably all part of my preference. Yes, I'm sure they're more functional than standard ROTS behind doors...but since the walls of the pullouts are tall & there are no doors, they're really drawers...just drawers without a drawer front. BTW...another idea for a space like that is a pullout broom closet...a pullout w/pegboard would give you a place to hang a broom, dustpan, swifter, mop, etc. As to lazy susans, most of today's lazy susans no longer have the "falling off" issue. The walls & back now follow the contour of the shelves and are so close to the shelves (probably within 1/8" to 1/4") there is no way anything can fall off. You also have a limited front exposed so there's also very little likelihood that anything will fall off the front either. Even my old kitchen's cheap builder-grade cabinets from 1995 had the "new" lazy susan. We never had anything fall off (b/c there was no place for anything to go) and the lazy susan itself was in the best shape of all the cabinets in my old kitchen...as a matter of fact, it operated as smoothly the day we demo'd as the first day. OTOH, my mom has the "old" lazy susans in both the upper & base corner cabinets (from 1960). Both lazy susans have room for things to fall off, and things do fall pretty often (especially if you spin them too quickly). While it's probably nice to be able store boxes of cereal or rice on the sides, it's a real pain to retrieve those fallen items. If that style was the only option out there for lazy susans, then I would join the ranks of those that hate susans! jsweenc...if I had found this Forum years ago, I might have taken the plunge and removed those shelves and put in ROTS as a DIY project! Instead, I lived with them for almost 13 years!

GreenDesigns, This was the kitchen design that I uploaded over in the Building a Home sub-forum back on Jan.31 as part of my first draft. Renovator8 made a useful comment - "A double loaded work space is a counter across from another counter that allows a cook to turn and use either surface quickly with a minimum of steps involved. This ability is essential not only for productivity but in order to avoid a disaster. Unnecessary walking in a kitchen should be avoided even if you are alone." His comment has steered me away from G-kitchens precisely because they all seem to have a lot of space in the middle and have the counters on the perimeter, meaning a lot of walking through empty space to get from A to B. Your design, while avoiding the mistakes on appliance placement that I made with my G-kitchen produces the same outcome that Renovator8 was warning about. Doesn't it? You guys are both pros so I'm not really in a position to see the nuance that makes your plan work but which sets off warning bells when I have a lot of open space in the kitchen. Lisa_a, I hope you won't mind some gentle critique. . . . It's precisely because of criticisms that everyone is kind enough to offer than I keep coming back and subjecting you all to more long-winded posts filled with new variations on plans. I am taking the criticisms to heart and they do percolate in my mind as I'm reviewing the problems with the plans, so please offer gentle and not so gentle criticisms. It's all good food for thought. For instance, the majority of people aren't keen on a powder room right next to the front entry. Don't I know, I've tried to avoid that but it's there because of a series of trade-offs. I have a copy of every single iteration that I've created on this plan so if I ever want to post a case-study on "The Evolution Of A House Design" I could demonstrate how each problem discovered shifted the plan to a new look and then the next problem again shifted the plan and so on. Here was the very first plan which had the master on the first floor and before I realized that I had way more space on the 2nd that I had absolutely no idea what to do with, which pushed me towards a smaller first with 2 bedrooms on the 2nd. Note where the powder room was. Note the lack of "birds on a wire seating" note the appliance placement. What I've been struggling with is that the first floor has 3 principal rooms, LR, DR, KI, and then I need to fit in a powder room, stairs, elevator, mudroom and central fireplace. There are only so many design options one can play with when you have 3 rooms and also want to maximize southern exposure. So I understand the drawback of placing the powder room right at the front, but because I wanted a wide-spanning gable roof on the front, I needed some space opposite the centered doorway to counterbalance the living room. Besides, the 2nd floor cantilevers out over the porch behind the powder room, so absent the powder room that porch would be very deep. I thought of putting the powder room next to the basement stairs, in the back of the house, next to the garage, but that would create the problems I mentioned above. I like your kitchen design. I like the big island. I like the appliance placement. However, ever since LWO made his comment about "birds on a wire" I realized that I agree with that viewpoint. I tried to avoid that situation in my very first plan and now that I've played around with banquet seating I think I want to stick with that instead of island seating. To refer back to what I mentioned much earlier about all sorts of hell breaking loose when I played around with the walls, your moving of the "fridge wall" now creates all sorts of misery on the 2nd floor and especially at the roof level for that wall was a load bearing wall essential for roof support, but there was no way for you to know that. I'm going to keep your kitchen design in mind as I once again mull over starting with a blank slate for the whole house because I'm finding that if I pull on one end of the string somewhere then matters on the other end of the string start to unravel. As for the back deck, that was there principally as a wood storage location. The main entertainment and relaxation would be on a tiered stone backyard - I'm really dealing with a 3 dimensional area back there, so it will be very engaging visually, with stairs, slopes, tiers, terraces, etc. Kind of like this but much more involved. I understand your reason for making the mudroom door be part of the back hall but now I lose the airlock quality of the mudroom. I'm up in the mountains near a major ski resort, so I'm dealing with snow and cold and I'm really wanting to isolate the heat loss from opening doors. As for the exercise bike, it had to be next to a counter so that the grain mill and motor have a place to be stationed. I'm not really looking forward to balancing the grain mill in my hand as I peddle the bike. I joke, but I really am looking forward to the ability to get a morning "ride" in when it's miserable outside and do double duty by milling fresh flour for the day. Of course this isn't an iron-clad must have but I'm going to be living in the house solo far more intensively than I will be using the house for entertaining, so I can always move the bike temporarily when it would be unsightly to guests. Putting the door there and removing the cabinet works for guests in the house scenarios, but for a single guy living alone it doesn't give me an advantage. The challenge I'm facing is that, unlike with a game of poker in which many different hands are possible, I'm playing with a deck of cards that only has 3-4 cards, say, so the limited combinations of rooms and purposes is really cramping me up. I do like your big island, principally because I like the surface area it gives me to work with. I'm going to keep the short and squat idea in mind rather than the long and narrow that I was working with.

Chanop -- great pic! I was never really able to let my older son help when he was little because he has special needs. It's really only this year (he's 9) that he's able to do things even close to properly. If I'd given him a rolling pin before now, he would've swung it around until it broke a window or a nose, or bashed a knob off the range, etc. We could never predict what he was going to do. He also could not follow directions at all ("No" meant nothing to him until about a year ago). I guess that's really what stifled my desire to have my boys in the kitchen. Older son was just too difficult and unpredictable until now. And now, my younger son (6) is a speeding bullet! He vibrates and can't sit still or keep his arms in place. They're always waving around, knocking things over. But your post reminded me of something both my boys have been GREAT at for the past year: making homemade corn tortillas! I roll the balls, and they take turns using the tortilla press. Somehow, there's never been a struggle having them help with that. And...we do that at the island.

We just did this! Everyone said it could not be done. Everyone said "why do you want your island to move?" Everyone said "Don't do that otherwise you can't have power (electricity) in the island." Everyone said "it will be too heavy for casters." Guess what? We did it and we LOVED it. In fact our contractor fought us on it and then after we forced him to do it, he admitted it was a great idea and he was going to recommend it to others. We have wine racks on one side with stools and plenty of storage on the other side - 2 cabinets, 2 top drawers and 2 deep pot drawers. It was the best thing we ever did, being able to move the island if we had to is key. Plus we don't need power in it as we have plenty of outlets elsewhere. The only hiccup was finding casters that were strong enough - because the island is 70x40 and with the granite it is very heavy. Home Depot doesn't really have the right size/weight so we had to order casters online.