@Laura Hoefer seems like your situation is not as bad as ours in terms of exposure. We didn't know about the windows and my kid's bed was right by them. He got exposed a lot with all the opening and closing. Plus the age doesn't help - he still puts everything in his mouth. If you decide to strip them yourself, I would advise to take a class on lead safety. That being said seems like it's a very complicated process and it might make the situation worse. There are some sealing paints for lead, but you'll still have to scrape the peeling paint off, which is dangerous. I'm going to strip only the 1st floor windows as it gets warmer (they are 8 ft tall so super expensive to replace), but we decided to replace the rest. Restoring is even more expensive if a professional is hired. Have you tried using professional lead cleaning products for lead to mop the floors? Maybe this will help reduce the exposure for your kids. It's all so scary. I'm scared that my kid will be permanently brain-damaged due to all of this :(

As a buyer that one cabinet on the window wall would both bug me aesthetically and scream "not enough storage so we crammed cabinets everywhere we could" which makes the space issue super obvious. Yes, it is a small kitchen and storage is going to be a concern, but you want buyers to be thinking 'oh, what a lovey space!' rather than 'but where would I put my X?' when they are looking at it. The space issue is for them to figure out after they buy it if they don't notice before. It also visually closes in the space and makes it feel smaller. If you feel like you must have some kind of storage there I'd go with shallow open shelving - it seems like a nice place for a hot drink station (tea, coffee) potentially, so you could have shelves just deep enough for mugs and canisters of tea/sugar/etc. Somethig like that which provides storage but looks like things are just there because it's nice to have them accessible, not because there is no where else for them to go. (When I've had smaller kitchens I usually get creative with storage in adjacent rooms. Unless they snoop, no one can tell that your nice server cabinet in the dining room has less-used pots and pans or canned goods in it instead of tablecloths and placemats.)

Hello all, for some reason not all of the comments seemed to load before? Some other potentially helpful info. I have not asked our architect how he felt about sharing his work online so would like to refrain from doing so without asking. I work in a creative field and understand while we didn't sign anything that we couldn't, we also didn't ask and I feel that would be inappropriate. The overview of our thoughts are as follows: we have a 1200sqft cape on .4 acres. It is currently 3 bed (one small master) and 2.5 baths. There is no full bath on the second floor with two of the bedrooms, and the master is on the first floor. The living room and kitchen are both about 12 x 14' so small and a bit cramped for us. There is no dining room/other living spaces. We have had issues with the water table rising that we need to run our sump pump in the basement a few times and don't think finishing it would be the best idea. We have no access to the outside except from our front door. We're dog parents and thinking about having kids, but not there quite yet. We're lived a few places in the country and see this as our forever home. We have a 170k house looking to do a 200k renovation. Houses in our neighborhood typically sell for 190-250, BUT most houses in our neighborhood have zero updates and are being sold by original owners. One house in a near but different neighborhood that was flipped just sold for 425, so it's a bit difficult to tell if our neighborhood could go the same way as owners change or not. We're talked a lot and are comfortable with this budget and the potential for that loss. Our realtor that helped us purchase the house thinks with the renovations we're talking about would sell in the 320-350k range. I'm mostly interested in general ideas as we have the wants/needs list and are working to refine it but are struggling in a few areas to come up with that final determination. Are we okay without a master bath? Can we live with just a one car garage? For both of these we think so and are ready to go without. How we feel about open concept, and is it worth moving the laundry out of the basement we feel more conflicted on.

Brettfelouzis, then the size of the light should be between 20” and 24” long. You could get away with 20” I think. Here’s what I did:: took some painter’s tape and marked out the lengths of the lights I considered by the door. Then I knew which way I was leaning. The “heaviness” of the light plays a role I think, as well. The more metal there is, the more presence it has and thus is visually heavier and in such a case, I would likely choose a 20” option. This is an example from my garage (my front door has a pendant, otherwise I would show it), these are 20” long. I would have gone longer but we couldn’t find any we liked. In the end, you just have to try the light out and if you don’t like it, return it.