Thanks for the awesome advice ladies. I have been away from the forums..we were out of town dealing with family illness. ANyway, on a brighter note..back to the reno! Jeri: I am not familiar with the designated broom closet thingy. I would love to see it. I am having a closet set up for that in my kitchen area, too. FirstHouse: Any idea who it was that put the cubbies underneath? I'd love to see pictures. I can somewhat visualize since my current W/D is up on a pedestal but curious how useful they would be if I had to stand on my head to see in them. YKWIM? I am getting nervous abt the 3x3 space. I guess I never thought abt that! I am so thrilled to be getting it changed, I am blinded to the downsides... Jsweenc: Thank you for your thoughts...Where are u in NC? We r in CHarlotte...been here abt 5 years after being out in the midwest for most of our married life.DH is a USC alum/fan so we have the running.."real" Carolina discussion a lot! Of course, there really isn't any discussion since *we* know the answer! Anyway, you are very kind to play with my layout. That wall between the two rooms already exists. We had just planned to cut a hole in it for the door. The front part (where the powder room will go) is my current laundry room and the back part (cubbies) is a storage room that backs up to the laundry room. We are stealing that space from the garage if you will. The back wall is approx 10 ft wide. W/D are standard front loaders at 27" but GC said allow 30" for each one. Not a lot of space. It looks a lot bigger on paper!! We are moving our entrance to the house to back area from a door that is currently on the other side of the commode wall in the drawing. I am putting a coat closet there.So I will have additional storage for coats besides the ONE they are to put in the cubbie.(yeah, right...I'll need to do an inservice with the kids on that!) I am not married to closing everything off in cabinets. I am leaning toward wanting to close my laundry area off from the powder room with a pocket door though. I'd like to think my LR will be neat and clean but it really never is.I suffer from CHAOS which is an acronym for "Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome" because my house is always a mess.I feel like that back area will suffer the most even with additional storage. I thought about switching the kid's zone to the file drawer area but worried about the mess. I also have that window right in the middle. Both of those windows currently exist and moving them would require a lot of additional expense. I toyed with the idea of putting the powder room on the window side but figured it would make it dark down the hallway. That would free up cubbie space on the other side. I'd LOVE to hear what you guys think about all of this....My GC emailed me yesterday and wants to finalize things next week!!!!! Yikes....I'm getting a little panicky...

LL, I didn't see your question until now, sorry. I wasn't going to draw up a plan that recesses the fridge into the pantry closet because it sounds like that set-up limits the size of fridge Flying can get - 30" most likely, possibly 33" - unless she makes modifications to the bathroom, swapping out the tub for a shower as suggested by lascatx above. Personally, I'd be reluctant to limit fridge size. My SIL had a heckuva time finding a new fridge to fit their existing cabinet - height and width were what was common when they built, not what is common now. We had to modify our cabinet by jacking it up 2" with plywood inserts at the base - ugly but short-term - to fit our new, taller fridge. Thank goodness we weren't hindered by soffits like my SIL. That said, there does seem to be more choices for smaller fridges that there were even a couple years ago so perhaps this isn't a big deal after all. But it's still not the norm, which means fridges will often cost more. But if that's not a concern for Flying, then yes, changes can be made to the plan I posted Tue, Aug 23, 11 at 20:39 so that the sink can be placed on the entry wall. The door would need to stay put or shift over only 6" so that there's room to have the DW next to the sink. It would be 12" of wall, 40" door, DW, 33" or 36" sink cab (smaller sink cab leaves a few more inches between counter run and doorway), spacer cabinet, corner, then 38" to range. This would leave a long stretch of peninsula counter between DR and kitchen. The 2nd oven would need to go under the counter here. The bathroom wall set-up would need to change a bit, too. because the entry shifts over only 6", not 12". Staggering the cabinet depth would work: 12" deep cabs close to the doorway, 18" deep cabs next to the fridge. If Flying has the funds and the desire to do the extra remodeling required to recess a 36" fridge in the pantry closet, the above still works, too. But if the only reason for all this extra work is to get a view to the backyard, it might not be necessary. Flying's back door has a window in its top half. If that's not enough, she can add a window along that back wall ala the photo I posted Fri, Aug 12, 11 at 14:02. It would mean giving up a little bit of upper cabinet room (about 12" I think).

Your laundry/mud/bath is a similar layout to what I have, except I have a tub/shower in that bath. A laundry setup like that doesn't leave you much storage, or room for ironing, folding, or hanging, so keep that in mind. I have to do my ironing in my bedroom. I also don't have a utility sink, to make room for extra cabinets. While a utility sink would be great, I do have a kitchen and bathroom sink close enough that it's not a big deal. And the way the rest of that floor is played out, it puts that bath really far from your guest entrance, office, living room and dining room. You mentioned a downside being that guests will walk through the mudroom, but remember that they will also have to go through your kitchen to get to the bathroom. I'm not sure I'd like that. BTW, you might as well forget about the door between the kitchen a mud room, as it will almost always be open. We changed ours to a cased opening instead of an actual door. I'd have preferred to go with a pocket door, just in case we wanted to be able to close it off for some odd reason, but we didn't want to have to tear into the wall to do it.

Here's another idea: Your foyer is the right size to be a half bath. And since it's across from the stairs, it's also naturally positioned off what will feel like a little hallway. You mentioned that the stack for the upstairs bathroom is somewhere over the dining room (I think on the wall between the dining room and the front porch)? If so, then the plumbing/sewer lines aren't far from the current foyer. The front door could move to where the front-facing living window is. This is one of the few fenestration changes you could make to the front of an old brick house that would look right because it involves only removing the few bricks below the window. This doesn't require reframing (so it's not expensive structural work), and you don't need to add any bricks (which is good because new brick work never matches quite right -- good enough for the less-visible sides of the house, but not something you'd want on the front). You said earlier that your living room is so long that you don't use part of it, so it shouldn't be any issue to define a small section at the end of the living room to be your foyer. There's also a couple handy walls there for hooks or a bench or a wardrobe or whatever foyer-like amenities you might want. I suspect it'd be an overall upgrade from your current foyer, which is pretty cramped. Meanwhile, moving the bathroom frees you up to devote the current half bath space to the kitchen. The result is a MUCH more functional galley kitchen. Since all the working areas of the kitchen are in one line and the walkway is a generous width, you could easily have three people working in this new kitchen. You'll also be flooding both the kitchen and living room with light and creating a great cross-breeze by having a direct, uninterrupted line from the new kitchen door to that living room window that is closest to the library. The kitchen is where you'd be doing your only structural work -- removing the current bathroom walls (if those are even structural) and creating a new window over the new sink location. The kitchen sink in the galley hasn't moved very far from the sink's current location, so hopefully that'll be more of a plumbing tweak than a situation where you have to pay to completely re-pipe. You'd also be turning the current kitchen window into your new kitchen door (which, like the living room window conversion, shouldn't require reframing and therefore wouldn't be structural) and bricking up over where the old kitchen door was. You could leave the bathroom window as-is if it is above counter height and you're willing to forgo a storage cabinet to the right of the stove. There's also a possibility that the bricks removed during the living-room-window-turned-door process and the kitchen-window-turned-door process and the new-kitchen-window-creation process could be salvaged and used to feather in the patching for the old front door and/or the old kitchen door. As for the mudroom, I'd suggest you make the library a mudroom/library. There are two great walls for mudroom stuff right next to the library's backdoor. Even with whatever furniture you have in there for the library purposes, that room generally has space for the whole family to pile in and take off their winter things at once. And you'd no longer have people with mudroom business traipsing through your kitchen. In general, the above is a WAY better kitchen and a WAY better mudroom situation without an addition.