I would open the wall between kitchen and dining room , eliminate the eating area and in this way make a bigger kitchen

Without really diving into the layout, I would ask how do you feel about the 2 living rooms? Many folks get rid of one in order to add space to more important areas. Would you consider making the front living room the dining room, taking the wall down between the dining room and kitchen and turning that into one large kitchen!? Have the sink in front of the bay, stove on left wall or remove/move sink window and put stove or cooktop there ...

Just a thought!

We are open to using most of the first floor differently.

I agree with Debbi. Open the wall between the kitchen/dining areas. Lose the bay window which will allow you to expand the kitchen along the back wall. Then the current formal living room can become your formal dining area, or you can simply add a dining space in the expanded kitchen.

How do you use the other spaces? Do you use both eating spaces? What about the two living spaces? Would you like to add a function (i.e. do you need a home office? Play room?)

Looks like you have sliding doors in the 'eating area' - is this a convenient spot to access the backyard or would moving them increase your indoor/outdoor functionality? Also it looks like the garage opens into the family room - is this your family's main entrance? Would you (ideally!) want to also have some mudroom space?

Looks like you have lots of space to work with - I'm sure you'll get there!

I am not sure why you have not been able to find a designer. Kitchen and bath places want to sell what they do get an actual KD freelance to look at the space .

Do you use both the formal dining room and the eat in area of the kitchen? For me, I would get rid of the dining room, and put the eat in area of the kitchen in front of the bay window. I'm not a designer, but I'd love to keep the bay window.

• We use the dining room a couple of times a month when family comes over but leave us with people in dining room and the eating area without visibility to one another. so using all of the square footage in kitchen and dining room differently would be a good thing.

• Formal living room is used very infrequently other than to take a phone call away from the rest of the activity.

• We do want to add function. We don't necessarily need a specific space though. (office in basement and extra bedroom available) We are 4 with 1 headed to college soon. We really want to enjoy the kitchen more and use it as the gathering place.

• Great call out on lack of mud room. It is our biggest complaint about the space but 20+ years ago, but it was a great fit at the time. The lack of a mud room makes for a need to carefully manage dog traffic. :) A mud room would be amazing.

Your floor plan is very similar to that of my first house. Is it around 1800-1900 sq ft, without the basement? I've often wondered how I would have remodeled had we stayed put, keeping the neighborhood market as well as the trend to eliminate formal spaces in mind.

Eliminating the LR, moving the DR to the LR and expanding the kitchen into the DR without changing the FR's size ... wow, that's one huge kitchen that, IMO seems out of scale to the rest of the 1st floor.

Can you raise the sunken floor in your FR - is your hearth raised or floor level? - without too much effort so that you can expand both kitchen and FR? Your fireplace will be off-center; will that bother you?

I expanded the FR towards the kitchen and added window seats on each side of the fireplace.

Here's another idea to ponder.

I turned the LR into
a home office/flex room, moved the kitchen to the DR, oriented it so to keep the bay window, moved the DR into the old kitchen area and left
the FR alone. I also added 2 more windows in the new DR area.
Not sure how the market is in your area, but a home office is always a big selling point in my area.

Missed your comment about the lack of a mudroom. Our first house had a laundry room/mudroom between FR and garage. It was so handy.

Maybe this?

following

Is your basement finished? That will increase costs to move plumbing. Is your budget generous enough to move plumbing, venting, walls, etc?

Don't know how I missed your comment about not needing home office. Oh, well, took me only a few minutes to draw that one up.

Nice thing about the sink/DW in the peninsula for you would be that you have views of your sunken family room while you prep. Perhaps you could even put seating there to chat with people while you're at the sink.

cant tell if the dimensions support this

Kitchen expands to take over casual dining area. Mudroom takes over closet. Refrigerator is moved over to top wall by sink to make it easy to put groceries on island/counter to fill refrigerator.

make island bigger, with eating area.

Old refrigerator space is pantry cabinet

range is moved over a little to gove some space on both sides.

Sliding doors moved to family room

I would leave the dining alone, but make the living room convertible to extra guest space so everyone can eat in close proximity. The family room /breakfast area has a table or maybe peninsula if possible.

If you *don't* want to take down the wall, you might consider just engulfing the current breakfast area with more kitchen, and expanding your island so that a couple of people could perch there if need be...

@ Everyone Wow so much great feed back! Thank You for your generosity.

@ lisa_a

The basement is finished, but the drop ceiling makes it accessible, but not as easily as if not at all. There is a plumbing drain in that wall that could be moved to the outside wall.

I agree on the concern about the enlarged kitchen becoming out of scale with the rest of the first floor.

The sunken family room while a trend at the time leaves us a little sunk a the moment as raising he level would be significant work.

@Kim. Interesting I will try to visualize that one a bit!

@ Anthony .. That slider is an issue .. It would not work in the FR, but have thought of making the bay window a walkout.....

So glad i found this forum. Great ideas keep them coming! Many Many Thanks

This current dilemma could continue for months (or even years) with great ideas. Determine your choices based on the amount of time you plan to live in this house and whether you plan to sell within the next two years and base this decision also on the floorplans in your current neighborhood as well as the housing market.

Before making your decision also consider spending more of your time in choosing a good kitchen designer/architect as well as a great contractor. Take your time also with selecting your appliances needed.

Yes a lot to balance. While resale is not a top motivation (we have no foreseeable plans of moving). We don't want to over invest, because you never know and whatever we do should make sense. Payoff is in sight and the concept of that is appealing. In our development there are quite a few of this foot print. I don't know what the impact of this change would be from a market place view. My guess is that if it is done well it should be ok.

Another idea, one that is less ambitious, which translates to less expensive:

Wall between kitchen and DR is gone, one window of the bay is replaced with a French door, sliding door is removed and wall extended towards the FR to create a longer run of cabs and counter and room for the range to move to the exterior wall.

I moved the fridge from its alcove to the top wall and put pantry cabs in the alcove and added a peninsula between kitchen and FR.

I replaced the pantry closet with a bench and coat hooks, creating a mudroom without walls. Repeat the cab style and finish for a cohesive look.

I tried to add a mudroom with walls but without moving the door - and even then - I couldn't figure out how to do that without stealing a lot of space from the FR.

I did find a way to add a mudroom without stealing FR space but it requires many revisions to your first floor - relocating the front entry and front hall (to LR side), reducing LR size (and perhaps giving it another purpose), turning half bath 90 degees, moving garage door to enter where bathroom is, etc. Lots more $$$ to do this and it's likely you won't get a good ROI would be when you go to sell.

btw, what is the span, top to bottom, between sink wall and basement stairs door? It looks like it's just over 10', which isn't enough width for an island so either I'm misunderstanding the dimensions or you have really tight aisles.

Hi Lisa. The distance from the sink wall to the basement stairs door is just under 10" (9"10 and 1/2 inches) it is this width issues that seems to keep us from more interesting layouts.

I am going to study this one a bit. This seems to feel balanced to me... ;)

Thanks for your generous effort.

You're welcome!

If your kitchen is just under 10' wide, then you definitely don't have room for an island.

118 1/2"

-25.5 - cab & counter depth (1 1/2" counter overhang)

- 42" aisle

________

51" remaining.

That's not enough room for an island and an aisle between it and the basement.

If you shrank the work aisle to 36", you could squeak in an 18" wide island and a 39" aisle between it and the basement stair doorway. But a 36" work aisle with a range is tight because a range is usually a few inches deeper than the counter. And if your fridge is not a counter depth model, a 36" aisle would never work.

So I think you're better off with a peninsula plan.Here's a dual peninsula plan.

Fridge stays where it currently is.

The left hand peninsula is 39" wide; 24" cabs facing the kitchen and 12" deep cabinets facing the DR. This takes the place of the pantry closet.

Imagine drawer fronts on the open pantry drawers below.

You could also do doors and ROTs (roll out trays), like this for the base cabs:

HTH!

My initial thought was very very similar to one of Lisa's except I enlarged the bay window too:

The dining area is narrow enough that you probably want to do a bench like this to leave more room for walking space past the table:

Because your garage shares a wall with the foyer, you also have the opportunity to make your foyer play double-duty and act as your mudroom as well. I moved the door to the garage to open directly into the foyer, and I moved the half bath so that you could have a wall of mudroom storage (a closet, hooks, shoe rack -- whatever you want). The mudroom storage wouldn't need to be as deep as the original half bath was, which opens up the foyer enough to have a bench where people can sit to take off shoes and put mudroom items away.

The half bath layout would be similar to this, which isn't roomy, but it's perfectly functional.

There are a lot of opportunities if you want to spent 200-300K on the project. If you don’t, then you’d better keep the layout and live with it as it and new cabinets and etc. That alone will be expensive enough at 50-75K.

I would get rid of the nook area- add that into your kitchen with the island used for casual eating. Do you use your nook for eating? My nook table is constantly covered in papers and is very rarely used for eating.

We are excited to ditch our nook and have the dining table... it will help us to actually use the dining room:)

I just looked up and see Lisa and a couple others are on the same page. I'm not sure I'd knock out the dining wall. A little separation is nice. And, it seems I've read that separate spaces are making a comeback after so much open great room plans.

Lisa's last plan is interesting. I have a friend with a sunken room and she has some cabinets that span upper and lower spaces like photo below.

I like Lisa and Heather's plan to move the kitchen to the dining room but I would take down the wall between the old dining room and living room and have a small sitting area in the old living room area. This gives people a quiet place to read or take a phone call away from the family room or just to sit and chat with the cook while they are in the kitchen. You could put your refrigerator and stove on outside wall and have a much larger island with a sink in it.

Opening up that wall a little would be nice. I have to see exactly where the cold air returns are in it.

Finally done except for a few things. some of you should definitely see your ideas here! thanks for your generosity and creativity.

Looks great! Can you give a rundown of your materials? Brands etc! I'm sure a lot of folks will ask! I have to say my favorite things are your floors, the lights and the mix of seating around the table!

Looks awesome! would you mind posting the layout you went with? I ask because my floor plan is almost identical to your before layout, and I’m gathering ideas on my options. Thank you!

THat s awesome ! Thanks so much!

I sell alot of Fabuwood cabinets and my customers love them