Here are some actual photos of the space for perspective.

I'm on team flip the spaces. Moving on... in the first plan you are wasting the space over to the left. At least in the second plan you are giving the option to spread people out.

"You're deathly allergic to baseballs...' OMG thank you for that laugh! I do understand what you are saying though and maybe I am wrong and can be convinced but these are my thoughts...

-If we are only going to have a single eating space I want it to feel like a dining room. Ideally separate and not near doorways going in an out of the house. Currently it drives me nuts that I enter from our mudroom and walk right into our table. I also want it to function well for holiday meals and large family gatherings when we put 2 leaves in our table.

-My main problem with every eat in kitchen we've had is cramped eating space, and it's what sparked this renovation (in fact we almost didn't buy this house because of it!). We are a family that eats all of our meals at the table. I'm not convinced people could be sitting at the table snacking, coloring etc and the rest of the family could be moving around it easily.

-I also just can't wrap my head around seeing the dining table from every entrance of our house (why oh why are there so many doorways in our kitchen?!). The current kitchen is unfortunately in the center of our first floor... Which is why I was thinking the island would be the barrier that keeps everyone out of my work space, all traffic would be on the other side.

This was my (incomplete) attempt at working it out if we did a swap... It would require moving a doorway on a load bearing wall between the living room and dining/kitchen and perhaps make the house more open concept than I would like. Our last house was very open and I didn't love it. I have four sons, we need separation between rooms ;)

This is going to be $$$ so I do want to do what's best! Do you think I could make this space still feel like a dining room? The eating area is really (really) important to me as you can maybe tell!

Do you have floor plans for the other floors of the house too? I have an idea that would involve tweaking couple steps of the stairs, but I'd have to see how the stairs interact with the other floors to make it work.

I completely understand about not loving open layouts. I do not either. Was the separate living and family rooms a big sell for you with this house? So kids and adults can hang out separately?

You're scaring me but sure here are the other floors! and yes we were drawn to the traditional layout of the house for sure. The rooms are all connected but not open which I like. In reality we don't have a terribly small kitchen and I could live with it, but we figure this is our forever house we want to make it work the best it can for our family and we may as well do it now to enjoy while the kids are little. I really appreciate your help!

Oh man, this was so unlikely to work, yet apparently it will! What I'm toying with is the idea of straightening out the last few steps of the staircases (the part that currently turns 90 degrees). Amazingly, that change works on all three floors with basically no disruption of anything and provides some significant space opportunities on the top two levels.

On the lowest level, the top few stairs of that staircase currently turn 90 degrees and go over that storage closet. If you straighten those few stairs to be in line with the rest of the staircase, then the top few stairs would just go straight over the back half of that storage closet instead of going over the whole storage closet. You'll actually gain some headroom in the front of that closet, so maybe that'll be useful?

On the main floor, a straightened staircase would look like this (below). The benefit of this (and why I hoped this was possible) is now most of the kitchen area can be 14' deep like the dining room. Moreover, the foyer-sunroom traffic pattern can be routed farther left past the kitchen. In general, that means a wider and deeper kitchen/dining room area to work with as we muddle around with floor plans for you.

On the second floor, straightening the top few steps would look like this (below). This actually frees up a fair amount of extra room (which now just looks like a big, oddly-shaped hallway) which you could use to improve the upstairs in some fashion. Is there anything you'd like to have upstairs? Adding a good-sized closet would definitely be the cheapest improvement you could do with that space, but you could also think a bit more ambitiously if there's something you really really want. A bigger bathroom, maybe? A second bathroom for the boys? Laundry upstairs, maybe? Any of those might be possible.

Your cost to straighten those last few steps on both staircases would be the cost of changing some very short walls and six steps. It is possible that is a relatively affordable thing to do, especially in the grand scheme of an entire kitchen remodel like yours.

Here's just one suggestion of what kind of kitchen/dining you could get with this extra space that this stair change frees up.

The part you'll find exciting is that there's much-improved of elbow room around the table and the island and wide natural walkways past both so you're not walking straight into either. Your sense in your current space that everything is super tight is mostly a function of (a) traffic flowing from doors/walkways smack into things rather than past things and (b) too-tight walkways everywhere.

For example, I'm fairly sure your walkways around your current island are 36" wide. This is actually considered the bare minimum for a single person to comfortably move around in kitchen, so it is no wonder that feels cramped with a family of six conglomerating in a space. 42" wide walkways are considered the bare minimum for someone to get by another in that same aisle (it's a squeeze-by, but they can still get by). 48" wide walkways is the recommended minimum distance to allow someone to walk normally by another person (with no squeezing). 60" is the recommended minimum walkway space for people to comfortably walk past seated people (e.g., walking behind people seated at the island). In this suggestion I just posted above, you'd have 4' aisles in between the island and perimeter counters (changing your from a one-person kitchen to one where people can comfortably pass each other) and a 5' wide aisle between the island seats and the wall behind them. You'd also have about 5' walkways everywhere people walk by the table and about 3' on the only side of the table where people won't really be walking by (there you just need room to scoot the chairs in and out).

I suggest you mock up these aisle widths I just mentioned with furniture or boxes (something 3D - not tape on the floor) that are approximately counter height and physically stand and sit there while family members try to pass by you in your mocked-up aisle.

There is nothing you could do that would be more illuminating than that as you try to decide how to fix your space than mocking things up like this. When you do, take careful note of the walkway widths that feel right for your family (make sure to account for the fact that your kids will grow) and then make sure your final design leaves the space you need to not feel cramped moving through rooms and around the table and the island. The numbers I just gave you are the industry standards for various situations, but your family may have slightly different preferences. My husband and I have minimum 48" walkways almost everywhere in our one-bedroom condo because any smaller drives me absolutely batty. My husband also keeps shoving our little dining table over so it's right up against the back of the couch because that creates a 7' walkway behind the table where there's a major thoroughfare through the apartment. When the table is floating where it technically should be, the major thoroughfare is only 4-5' wide, which the NKBA would say is basically enough, but it's the minimum, and to us (and especially to my husband), it feels tight. Your mileage with these things may vary, so mock it up in 3D with real family members pretending to do real things in that mocked-up space, and figure out your own family's ideal walkway widths.

That said, while this creates a lovely eat-in kitchen for a family of six, it doesn't really make for a lovely kitchen-dining with great eating space for large groups of extended family. For that, you might consider occasionally converting the living room into a dining room when you host large groups.

1) How many people do you need to seat during holidays?

2) I just really absorbed how much kid hangout space downstairs you have downstairs. Given that, do you need separate living and family rooms on this main floor? Is there any reason the living room couldn't permanently be your formal dining room?

Jillius, I had that same thought when briefly first looking at this. Family room with fireplace becomes living room. Living the dining. Kitchen dining all one. Ditto! Also could sunroom become the little breakfast nook or something?

rebunky I really appreciated all your input on my last thread!

Jillius wow thank you for such a creative idea. Are stairs really not that $$ to change? I need to absorb all that and when I am home later try to visualize it would be a huge change.

There is a slight difference on the floorplan I gave you - we moved the laundry upstairs a few years ago so we could add hooks and cubbies to the mudroom. Best thing we ever did I love having laundry upstairs and space for all our coats and boots, sports gear etc especially in the winter! Not sure that matters but I figured it was worth mentioning.

We also did look into making the sunroom part of the kitchen. It's an elevated space (no foundation), permitted for a 3 season room and it has a separate thermostat that controls electric baseboard heat. It's also annoyingly a small step down from the kitchen since it used to be a screened in porch I believe. Our contractor explained the cost just to update it as an interior space (studs spaced differently, insulation, beam to widen doorway etc) might not be worth it - it's 11x11 which isn't that large to eat in. I am going to look into changing the doors to french doors and trying to raise and match the flooring so it feels like a part of our house, but not sure it will be feasible. We are also redoing the deck and patio adjacent to the sun room next year... not sure I'll survive it all!

We do have a lot of different hang out spaces and use them all daily, except for the dining room which is one of my favorite spaces (bright and warm, great view of our yard which we have a done a lot to). That was another reason we wanted to make it feel more included in the house. I don't need a formal dining room necessarily, just a roomy enough eat-in area that I don't miss having a dining room. I definitely don't need two tables so close to each other!

I like having the separate family room which is electronics free, we read, play board games etc without the temptation for the kids to ask for tv. The living room is where our big tv and shared computer are. The playroom does have a big sectional and tv but we use it mainly when the kids and adults want to watch different things, like when we have people over. Otherwise it's where I banish the kids when they're being crazy or have friends over... If each kid has 1 friend over that's 8 boys in my house! ha.

My thinking was that it would be such a big space if we combine kitchen and dining that we should be able to make it work, it's just a shame that the stove wall is the one between the rooms! and all those doorways, plus the way the room narrows... it's just way more complicated than we thought when we said 'someday we should take down that wall'.

Our isles from sink to island are 42" (you can walk past the DW easily when it's open), but the fridge is so large it sticks out probably 9 more inches. We considered counter depth but with its width it's also really close to the table which squishes us... it's fine for now but I can't imagine it when the boys approach my husbands height - lots of 'MOM his knees are touching mine!' they're already saying that actually lol. The aisles on the other side are fine except for where the pantry closet sticks out, that's where it feels tight when people are over. I really am fine with the amount of storage I have now, I don't need more, but we need more space at the table and to move around the island.

Forgot to answer your question after that novel I just wrote! Ideally I want to fit my current table which expands to 110" when both leaves are in.

Did moving laundry upstairs change the floor plan upstairs in a way that the stair thing I'm suggesting wouldn't work anymore?

The cost of moving changing stairs REALLY depends on what is in the few little walls you'd have change/move. If you get unlucky and have a major structural post in there or an HVAC/electrical chase, moving those things can get extremely expensive. But if you get lucky and you're just talking a bit of a framing, a bit of drywall, and the carpentry/finish work to build a few new steps -- and if it turns out that that change absolutely makes the kitchen? Could certainly be in the realm of possible & worth it.

Also, while your current table's dimension are handy for us to have (you'll want to provide the width too for our noodling around here), it's also good to give us a total desired seating head count in case another table shape could seat the number you need while working in the space better. For instance, I used a round table in my suggestion above. Any other table shape would not have worked as well.

I had been wondering if there was a level change with the sunroom or if we could use that space. If it's not completely out of the case to take over the sunroom, there are ways to put parts of the kitchen in there (rather than the eat-in table) that could open up some interesting possibilities and free up a larger seating area and more walking around/elbow room.

Kim, I knew your space looked familiar, but my memory is so bad. I had to look up your old thread and then it all came back! Ok so you definitely use both the living room and family room for different activities, so moving dining to living room is out. Hmmm, let me think more. I’m sure Jillius’ has some ideas brewing on the horizon. Hopefully more will chime in as well.

The sunroom is up for grabs for sure. I've even considered adding on to the back of the house but I'd really prefer not to if we don't have to. If the cost to rework our existing space escalates however (sunroom conversion, walls, stairs etc), then maybe it would make sense to add actual square footage for all that money spent you know?

Ideally I don't want a whole room dedicated to a dining room - just a spacious enough kitchen and open dining area.

We'd need to seat 6 comfortably each day (our current kitchen table is 36x60 and it's not big enough). The dining room table is 40" wide which is perfect, I'd love to keep it since it's a semi-custom, good quality piece of furniture (and was really expensive - to us anyways!) but if our only choice to get this all to work was to buy new we would do that.

Would this layout solve any of my problems? or is it still too squishy you think?

One of the things that has been making this inescapably squishy was the seating at the island you wanted because that requires room for a 12-15" counter overhang and a 60" walkway behind the overhang. That is why I was wracking my brain about changing the stairs and/or moving the kitchen to the dining area trying to arrange for a full 14' of depth in the future kitchen.

Right now, you have 12'5" of room depth through most of your kitchen . 14' is the absolute bare minimum you need to have to just squeak by a kitchen with an island with seating for a bustling kitchen like yours. That is a 2' deep perimeter counter + 4' aisle + 3' deep island (2' deep cabinets plus 1' overhang) + 5' walkway behind the island = 14'. That is workable, even though, with 1.5" counter overhangs on both sides, the working done aisle between the perimeter and island would be more like 45" wide. And when you have a 12" overhang instead of the ideal 15", that can be a bit squishy. And 5' behind that is the bare minimum, which means adequate but not spacious by any means. Honestly, what the real bare minimum room depth for a busy kitchen with an island with seating should be 15' deep so you can get a real 48" working zone aisle (which allows people to comfortably walk past each other), a full 15" overhang for seating, and then a cushion of two inches for random wall unevenness installation quirks. And then if you wanted something that felt truly spacious, you'd want, like, 17-18' of depth.

With a kitchen that is only 12'5" deep, the only island seating that could even remotely be an option is a single seat on the short end of the island.

I see this latest suggestion of yours eliminated the island seating. If you are cool with no island seating, that takes a lot of the pressure off. In your current 12'5" deep space, you can easily fit and island with no seating and still improve the walkway room in a way that will magically uncramp your kitchen. For example, you could have a 2' deep perimeter counter + 1.5" counter overhang + 4' aisle + 1.5" overhang + 2' deep island + 1.5" overhang + 4' aisle = 12' and 4.5". To picture that kind of space, ignore the table seating for a moment and go stand in your current kitchen. Imagine if you eliminated the half wall behind your current island, eliminated the shallow cupboard against the stairs, swapped the fridge for a truly counter depth one, and swapped the upper and lowers behind the island for floor-to-ceiling pantry cabinets that are the same depth as the current upper (uppers are about 13" deep usually). Suddenly, everything in your current kitchen would fit comfortably, and suddenly it would feel easy and not stressful for so many people to be moving around in the kitchen.

In your shoes, since it does seem as if your family needs a lot of moving around space, I might even be investigating the stairs change and/or the room swap to get a full 14' of depth in my kitchen and then STILL not do island seating along the long side of the island in order to maximize the feel of spaciousness and ease of moving around. With a full 14' of depth, I'd just add another 6-12" of depth on my seatingless island and use the rest of the extra space to increase the walkway width going past the island. Then the kitchen would legitimately feel roomy.

Amazing explanation thank you! So basically it all comes down to math, a language I understand! I've been staring at our space thinking we should be able to make it all fit it looks so big, I think I just got greedy with the island seating. Honestly I would never want to eat (or serve) a meal at the island. I joke that I already feel like a waitress I am not about to add counter service to my kitchen ;)

My thought in adding the seating was to give the kids an extra hangout space, homework, crafts, even making cookies etc. We do that all at the kitchen table now, but no reason we can't do it at the new kitchen table and just clean up right after if it's near mealtime. It'd be nice to have but certainly not necessary. I've also observed people usually perch at islands during parties even when there is seating available - usually no one wants to sit when everyone can't sit. Since I can't have it all I'll choose space. The thought that we could possibly make our kitchen feel roomy is exciting :)

Until you just spelled it out I completely underestimated how much room counters, appliances and especially PEOPLE take up! Let me think it through... I am actually opening up to the idea of flipping spaces... I just need to picture that big table being pretty much in the center of the house.

Just a note, those glass cabinets where we have the coffee counter set up are 12" deep, they might have been custom because they fit EXACTLY in that little 12" deep x 64.5" wide cutout. The base cabinets seem to be standard counter depth (you can tell they put a filler between them and the wall. The pantry closets (by the stairs) are 20" deep but the interior shelves are only 12" deep.

Great explanation by Jillius!

I had seen your plan earlier that showed the kitchen and dining areas flipped and that got me thinking... The problem you seem to have is the traffic patterns - you said you'd hate to have the dining table in the way when traveling from the garage (makes sense!) but as you've come to see, having the island (+seating) there also is problematic.

You mentioned integrating the sunroom... I realize this isn't an 'easy' remodel, but if you were to add that floor space to your kitchen/dining, you could have the dining table there - tucked out of the way, and move the kitchen to the current dining area. This allows you to move the dining table out of the main traffic area from the garage and this gets the kitchen into the wider part of the area AND out of the main traffic lanes.

Below is an idea (it actually has the sunroom expanded about a foot to the right to really open up the aisle to the patio doors).

- Living room doorway is moved to the left - again to keep traffic out of the kitchen (but still have sight lines/openness)

- There's nothing in the space going from the garage entry to the main hall/stairs

- The view from the front door would include right to the back of the "sun room" (light!!)

Here, I made a cheat sheet for the guidelines. Combined a bunch of NKBA diagrams and advice we pass around all the time here.

Omg Jillius I just tried to like that twice but it unliked the second time. So liked it again! Very helpful and hope it’s added to the new to kitchens thread.

Thanks, Rebunky! A friend of mine from grad school was interested in getting into kitchen designing as a hobby too, so I made her a much rougher cheat sheet a while back. Been thinking ever since that it'd be nice if we had a go-to infographic for this kind of thing.

Again so helpful thank you! A little off topic, but why the need for 1.5" counter overhangs? Wouldn't save a ton of space, but in a narrow kitchen even 6" makes a difference... just curious!

damiarain- Thank you! What you proposed is really similar to what we originally were thinking we'd do about a year ago when we started looking into fixing the kitchen! Although at the time we thought we'd leave the dining room alone and just relocate the refrigerator (since it's partly against the sunroom wall and partly on the exterior). Our contractor at the time told us we'd need to hire an architect and structural engineer before he could even properly give us an estimate to open the doorway and bring the sunroom up to code but had said if we didn't have a $15K budget just for converting the sun room, installing a beam, paying the engineer etc it wouldn't be worth investigating. We do have that $$ in the budget now if it's the best plan so I'm open to doing it! My other hesitation at the time is the sunroom has a vaulted ceiling - would that be an awkward transition if the table was partly in both?

I’m not a pro at the design aspect, but I wanted to throw my opinion out there as a mom of four boys, too!

- In our old kitchen we had a peninsula separating our table from the kitchen space. I HATED it and would never recommend one for your kitchen. It made traffic patterns so annoyingly in the kitchen with that many bodies.

- Leave lots of space for your table. More than you think you need. My middle schooler is just so tall, just shy of 6 feet, and at some point we’re going to have 5 his size sprawling around a table. We need lots of leg room and are getting a custom table 48” wide to accommodate them.

- We have a counter depth fridge with a chest freezer in the garage. I worried about the size of the counter depth fridge, but we go through food so quickly that storage isn’t the problem. I just have to go to the grocery store 5 times a week. Which is fun.

- Lastly, I always have to chime in about budget. This remodel is going to cost a ton of money. When I started thinking about our remodel, I seemed to naively think it would cost at most $75k, given that we didn’t have any structural changes. We had quotes as high as $150k from fancy design build firms, but ended coming in a little over $100k. Yours will cost more.

The 1.5"-2" counter overhangs are standard and are so your counters extend slightly past your cabinet doors. Standard cabinet BOXES are 24". Then you add the doors/drawer fronts, which brings the cabinets out another inch. So a 1.5" counter overhang means your counter extends about a half inch past your cabinets. That is why we measure aisle widths COUNTER-TO-COUNTER, not box to box. It is a very common mistake that people allot only 24" for the cabinet depth on both sides if a walkway and then are dismayed to find their actual aisle is 3-4" smaller in practice than they'd planned.

I have seen super modern kitchens where they install the counters to be exactly flush with the front of the cabinet doors (so roughly a 1" overhang) for aesthetic reasons, but that is a tricky, unforgiving install because ANY variation or un-flush-ness in the cabinet doors throws it off. Also, then the cabinets aren't nearly as protected from liquid and crumbs dripping/falling off the counter. Someone else may chime in with other reasons too, but it's my impression that you definitely want an overhang. We did a 1.5" overhang in our kitchen, and it's adequate, but I wish I'd done 2". I've got a lot of drips down my cabinets, and I definitely wouldn't be sad to have another inch of depth on my peninsula counter.

my_four_sons thank you for all that info. I also love that you have first hand experience and are validating my desire to have a spacious eat in area! My husband is 6'1" so if the boys follow him we'll need as much space as we can, especially if they have all their friends in and out of the house someday (which we hope they do!). I had the same thoughts about the counter depth fridge. I shop multiple times a week and we will put an extra fridge in our garage.

Would you say it was all worth it in the end? Your budget numbers sound about right but yikes :/ I'd obviously rather spend less if we can but what you are saying doesn't surprise me. We have friends with the same layout kitchen and just updating and rearranging without the structural stuff they were quoted $75k. This is why I am over analyzing and trying to think every option through before I even get the experts in to measure my space and come up with designs. I really want this done right because we are only doing it once!

Kim, how important is direct access from the kitchen to the outside for you? Do you guys grill or eat outside often? Or is it more that you need a door to the backyard somewhere off the living areas, but it doesn't necessarily have to be handy to or in the kitchen?