Anywhere but the den or nook or on the other side of the dining room is going to mean you have to completely reconfigure your roof unless you're willing to go with a flat roof which I would strongly advice against.

I totally missed that this means we'll have to reconfigure the roof. The roof has over 20 years of life left in it, but we might be able to recycle them. But yes, we will have to sacrifice somewhere, the question is where. It is good for me to have a list of compiled tradeoffs to consider, so we can check with GC which one we should pursue budget wise both in terms of building and maintenance. I assume flat roof is a pain to maintain.

Interior pics ?

Thank you for the ideas! Do you think it might be wise and doable (dimension-wise) to swap the kitchen and the den? If we do that, the kitchen can open to the living room.

Thanks to ideas in this thread, we are now thinking of potentially just modifying area around the kitchen, potentially extending it. The nook was actually an extension. It is an interesting idea to open the dining wall to avoid extending the footprint, we will need to look into that carefully. I personally like the idea of being able to use it every day. One potential concern here is the resale value of the property if a dining room is unavailable. Is it possible, or even advisable, to put a separator there that can be opened and closed easily, and opened most of the times, such as a good looking interior accordion glass door? The dining room looks pretty formal with built-in, recess/niche in wall and tray ceiling. We also fell in love with a nook that we saw at a house, and thought it might be nice to have it for breakfast and for doing homework, since we have three very young children.

The simplest would be to move the mudroom into some of the garage space and then use that space to expand the kitchen. Then you can keep the nook and keep the wall to the dining room, and minimize the cost of having to do an addition.

Plans by Marcy

I agree with lyfia so far as combining the mud room with the kitchen to increase your square footage. Also, unless there is a reason for the step down into the breakfast nook, other than aesthetics, it seems to me, raising the floor in that area would allow for more options in rearranging the cabinets to better serve your lifestyle & space requirements. Leveling the floors would alleviate your tripping problem, even if you left your cabinets alone.

Move.

Existing nook looks lovely. And that's a whole lot of garage! So another vote for extending mudroom into garage, which even has an existing exterior door in a good spot if it were at the end of a mudroom, though maybe replace the door with one with a window. Me, I would trade a surplus garage space for a generous mudroom with an adjacent mud & dog bath, even if it meant that third stall became only big enough for a riding lawn mower or a subcompact car. Where is laundry? If only a closet someplace, I might put that there, too. Family houses need real service space!

Agree about the mudroom and also agree about opening up the dining room. I'd also post on the kitchen forum to get their ideas.

My first thought was also: do you need both a nook and a dining room? If not, I would definitely level out the floors, open up the space to the dining room, and then look at the best way to configure things. Creating a mudroom in your large garage is an awesome idea. All of this will be much cheaper than extending, and if you're looking for a more family-friendly flow rather than formal spaces, more functional too.

Even if you do want to keep the nook, moving the mudroom to the garage and perhaps the entrance further toward the dining room, and making the kitchen and dining room open to each other will also let you have a bigger kitchen and better flow.

I've been thinking about this again, and it seems that as many suggested, it might be indeed a good idea to combine the kitchen, mud room, and the dining, and make that part open plan, with semi formal furnitures in the dining room. We might keep the nook for breakfast, or not. We actually like having a mudroom that is accessible to young children without supervision, and we will not let them go to the garage unsupervised because of the workshop. My husband is a car hobbyist, and he needs the three cars space in the garage, and the tool storage and workshop space there. But I saw that there's an outside corner between garage and kitchen/nook, where the peninsula start. Maybe we can look into building a small extension there just for a mudroom? Right now we have two door cavities already, one from the garage and one from the kitchen, so I guess we can just connect those two. The current mudroom is too small for our usage, though because it's connected to the garage then we can spill over to the garage easily.

I will have to consult the drawings tomorrow and check whether the dining and mudroom walls are structural. Is it still cheaper to open up the walls, including if adding load bearing support is needed, rather than just extending out? Our thought is that extending out might be cleaner, because right now the workflow is awesome, from where we get home from garage, kids get in from mudroom and hang their stuff there (or put their homework there in the evening). Also when our dog needs to be let out, we have that door in the nook, and thinking of fencing out a small part of the yard from that part for dog run. But I can see that the formal dining room does not get used much. I also worry a bit that extending the nook out might somehow ruins the back elevation balance.

Can you draw in a plan where you are thinking of extending out?

We were thinking of just extending in the natural direction of the nook, straight out. I can draw and scan this evening. We are also now discussing about moving the mudroom and opening the dining room wall as everyone suggested, because it seems like a good idea to connect the two and make the kitchen less isolated. Now toying with the idea of doing a small addition in the outside corner between the nook and garage, for a small mudroom, since there are already two exterior doors there (at the nook and garage) that we can perhaps repurpose to connect the mudroom, kitchen and the garage.

That sounds good to me.

Sorry it took me a while to get here! Below is the screen shot. We could extend the nook out (shaded box A, rectangular or following the shape of current nook), extend the back wall out (shaded box B), and/or build small extension for mudroom (box C). Box A will involve pretty straightforward roof extension. Box B will involve more substantial roof rework, most likely touching other areas, and box C roof situation is similar to box B, but since it's "just" a mudroom, maybe we can take shortcut and do flat roof there.

The time for construction is also a factor, we want to move back in asap..

If you need more space in the workshop area here's option D.

D - less than ideal to have a path through the kitchen to enter the house, but kitchen is close and adjacent to the dining room and you could put door swing differently and use the wall between dining and kitchen to house things out of the work triangle.

B - Very expensive - you have to rework your whole roof or go with a flat roof that will leak - the question is just when.

C - not very useful as you have to go into the mudroom when you come from the garage in a very roundabout way as well as when then getting into the garage you have to walk around everything to get anywhere and the mudroom looks small.

A - If you make it all level then it would be the better one out of A-C, but the kitchen will be further from the dining room and you'll have the jogs of the original house to contend with when extending the kitchen.

I'd choose option A or D (and maybe not extend the workshop area), but figure out which trade offs you want to make. A would be more expensive than D if not extending the workshop area. Also not sure what the roof looks like and if you could even extend the workshop area. Extending a workshop area would be a little less costly as you don't need the same finishes as you do inside and no windows needed unless you want some.

Thank you, Lyfia! That is a creative solution. Unfortunately we'll hit the side setback line. Maybe we can move box D?

I'd explore possibilities of doing the workshop in other creative ideas. How much do you have available to the setback and what exactly does your DH use it for? Storing tools, assembling motors and other things or? We have a shop in our backyard, however it also serves as a garage in addition to our existing garage.

Your nook extension looks like its a little narrower than the kitchen. It bothers the OCD parts of my brain... :-) It looks like there's maybe 16-ish feet of width there? Maybe spin the mudroom sideways along the garage wall, so it it serves as sort of an entry hall (maybe 5' wide-ish - enough for shallow-ish storage cubbies that still allow someone to pass by while a child is hanging up a backpack?). If the space is 16 feet wide, that'd leave 11-ish for kitchen - maybe a galley that runs front-to-back, opening to the dining room on one side and a little built-in area in the bay on the other end?

Or there's this:

on second thought, the galley-into-the-bay idea may not be so hot:

seems a bit cramped.

The one's spacious, but what to do with the mudroom??

This is what I meant about "spinning" the mud room.

My gut tells me you have enough space to get what you want without really needing to add on - you just have to find a creative local designer to help you make it work. :-)