Thank you all for your feedback and suggestions. Sorry it took us a while to respond, it takes a weekend for us to have enough hands to work on this and take care of a very active kid. We’re long-time lurkers here, so the FAQs are familiar and we used them, and some of the other internet lists of dimensions, in our planning. Benjesbride – thanks for posting the layouts; I’d run out of space by the time I’d pasted in that huge description and gardenweb would only let me include links. I’m reposting the diagrams somewhere more useful, and will add a few more in a moment. Buehl – yeah, we agree that less than 12” next to the range is too tight, which is why we’re here :). I went back and relabeled the diagrams to ensure we had the right measurements. Turns out we had missed 2 extra inches in width (it’s 160 not 158 – which makes sense as it’s a rounder #) – doesn’t help the range situation, but will help in other ways. I’ve also labeled everything down to the other end of the room, as I hadn’t expected someone (sena01) actually trying to render the whole layout for us. It’s a big room, fitting 60” of range shouldn’t be this hard, but really what we want is 96” of range+counter (18+60+18), and that’s trickier. Debbie B. – we are having fun with the space, and hope to have fun in the space. I’m sure there’ll be another kid down the road, and they’ll be expected to participate in cooking. My wife was cooking early, so it’s family tradition. I suspect, however, we’ll have them help from outside the work aisle. Funkycamper – buffet/butlery is the area left of the fireplace, 15-24” depth with the extra sink in pictures 1 & 2. Sena01 – thank you for all your thoughts on our layouts, and your recommendations. We hadn’t thought of switching the pantry door and it may be worth doing. It’ll depend a lot on whether we put cabinets on that wall (12” or 15”, as you’ll see in a moment we think there’s enough room). The closet isn’t quite wide enough to walk into so if we put cabinets there it probably makes more sense to have 2 shallow storage spaces rather than one extra-deep one. If we don’t put cabinets there, flipping it around makes a lot of sense (though visually it creates a row of doors). I’d also tried for a while to figure out if I could use its space for the fridge. I like the idea of the corner-sink. My biggest concern is the proximity of the range to the windows on either side (3”). I’d read that there may be limits on how close a range can be – any ideas? I notice you have relatively wide aisles in the layout, and I think there’s actually more width to the room that we could play with in your design. We tried it out one night this week and are entirely comfortable with a 41” work aisle. The passthrough aisle seems OK at 41, provided there’s no fridge on that wall. Continued in next post...

@texasgal47: I am actually already thinking of a solutiion using a gateleg. I have access to an IKEA Norden table that with some slight leg tweaking (i.e. place leg in center of the table + shorten leg to close fully) it should to the trick: -> @Jillius: Yes, the entrance to the apt. goes through the hallway. The windows below are windows swinging out. The door on the bottom left (of this sentence) lead to a balcony. Here is the full view:

Problem solved ! Since a lot of you sent pics With tall white flowers shallow flat vase , I went to a few stores today and imagine my surprise when I found this arrangement at a furniture consignment store!! Thank you everyone for all your help I love how we can get advice from each other

the ideal thing would be close the hall entry. come down the hall to family room...the family room/kitchen passage is wide and that is where traffic will come round from the hallway without any issue.....its not a big distance. You can load up the two walls of kitchen area then and get cabinets and fridge or any appliance out of dining zone. Avoid hurting resale value of home.... You could alternatively create a better U with 10 ft wall and shorter sides on the other two walls......it would be open to dining and lower zone of space.