Hmmm, I don't know that I'd really want the brooms, dustpans, etc. in the same closet as food. I'd try to avoid that if possible. Can you do a 12" broom closet and then a separate 36" pantry? There are alternatives to opening both doors - you could do where you have drawers that fit in an 18" cabinet and roll outs for each side...but you do loose a good bit of space with the additional shelving. You can do full pantry roll-outs...these can get to be surprisingly pricey from my experience in looking at them, but the unit attaches to the door and the whole door pulls forward brings some or all of the contents forward at the same time. I think it really depends on how you plan on using things and how often you will be in your pantry. I've minimized my opening and then pulling in the rest of my kitchen by using mostly drawers...the pantry, I stayed a little more "traditional" in opening two doors. I looked at the pull outs and I just wasn't feeling them...although they work great for some people.

Well, "life" happened and the kitchen took a back seat :(. It's always on my mid but did not get a chance to spend any quality time on it. Thank you jakuvall, for some reason I did not realize that 36X33 would have smaller suzan - duhhh - thank you for pointing it out. That now makes me think twice about doing 36X33 as I am "loosing" more space than I thought. westsider40 - I was looking at the rev-a-shelf but did not look closely at the measurements. I will double check to see how much space is inside the rails. I don't like that left corner so much that I am considering moving the window so I can have more usable cabinet sizes. As I have it now on the uppers, I do see how having skinny 9" (about) door as part of easy reach and than 12 inch door/cab might not be the best. And there is just no great solution for the bottom either. If I move the window about 10 inch to the right and make my cabs 13" deep since I think I can do maybe 26X26 easy reach than 15" cab and 29" cab on the other side of the window. I Than the bottom cabinets I think could be - 36X36 susan, 12" (pullout), 30" sink cab, 15" drawer. I have total of 119 inches on that wall but want to leave couple of inches (I think maybe I'll leave 3") between the cabinets and door molding. I will have to draw it out and see if i need to tweak the sizes as I am not that quick with math but it seems like maybe that would be a better solution? I will play around with couple layouts and see what makes more sense. Once I re-do my drawings, should I make a new post or continue this one - not sure what is more acceptable and easier or proper.

These refrigerator pulls are placed just above the rail, which is the most comfortable for me on my door. And the pantry door pulls are in a different location. Still works fine because the scale and use is different. My horizontal rail is at about the same height as this pantry (in relation to the nearby counter). Seems low for a pull, right? Tipping the scales towards going with just above the rail for function/ergonomics (maybe they not be damned;-). Liking what nidnay said about being one of those things you don't notice after awhile and what Flo said about just putting them where they feel right.

Thank you everyone for your time and great feedback. Let me try to answer some of your questions and clarify a few things… The kitchen and current dining space combined is 11’5” deep by 23’8” wide. Our budget is around 20K and we could and are willing to do some plumbing or move a gas line for our oven/stove. We recently replaced our dishwasher and oven/stove. Our fridge is still fine but could be replaced if necessary (but we don’t want to spend 6-10K on a new counterdepth fridge). So the budget would be primarily for cabinets, countertops, any plumbing or gas line work, etc. We are one of the largest houses in the neighborhood so we aren’t wanting to spend a ton on the kitchen and overprice the house for the area, but for the size of our house our current kitchen is not working (we only have one drawer for silverware and then a small 12” drawer for utensils…it’s just not very user friendly or functional) and needs redone. We tinkered with flipping the current kitchen and dining space but run into some problems. 1) The large 72” wide picture window in the dining space is only 29” up from the floor, so it would be below the cabinet and countertop. The smaller 36”x36” above the current sink would likely need to be altered to fit the space more appropriately. We have stucco so it is a lot more involved and costly to change window sizes or placement leaving us pretty much stuck with the present windows. 2) We have soffits above our current kitchen cabinets that we were hoping to be able to open up but we realized the one along the top wall over the sink is filled with plumbing from our 2nd floor main bathroom as well as HVAC. Too costly to move for our budget so it would have to stay and look out of place all alone over there without cabinets or something else to help camouflage it. The one along the shorter wall can be taken out and we plan to do so in order to have taller cabinets on that wall. There was a wall between the kitchen and current dining room that we took out (only a small 30” deep stud wall remains next to the fridge). We have a standard fridge and would like to try to decrease the amount of space it takes and projects from the wall. We realized there is a double wall on the right wall in-between the kitchen and bathroom. We have decided to move the fridge there because we can recess it back 3-4” making it appear closer to a counterdepth fridge. Our current “living room” acts more like a family room for us, but we also just refinished our basement in the last year and that area serves more as our present family room. Since it is a large room, it would be a bit awkward to put our kitchen table there and have some extra space in the living room that leaves us wondering how it would be used. Our current “family room” with the fireplace is a room we don’t use because our fireplace isn’t functioning. It is merely a room we walk through in order to access our backyard and why we thought taking some space from the room for a mudroom might be a good option. Our current kitchen table is large (40x72) with a bench and 4 tall/high back chairs. It takes up a lot of space in the current “dining room” space and why we were tinkering with a smaller table for the kitchen and moving the larger table to a new dining room in the back. However, it does make sense that we would likely no longer use that second table and would be a wasted space. @emilyam819 Yes, we will be removing the small stud wall by the current fridge to allow more freedom in the design. Please see note above about the wall removal and possible fridge relocation. @latifolia Our current dining area is the left part of the open space in front of the large picture window. We are considering putting a smaller table there so we can still have a place to eat yet have more room for cabinets and then moving our large kitchen table to the back room with the fireplace. It currently is an unused space as the fireplace is nonfunctional and why we are considering making a mudroom back there as well. But we understand dining rooms often go unused so maybe that area is better served as a den or office space like you suggested.Our laundry room is in the basement as we have a laundry chute and don’t have the room to put it on the 1st or 2nd floors. @Cherie “Too bad you can't remove the walls.”—I know, right!?! It’s so frustrating! But we have sulked about it too long and need to accept it and move on, but it is such a bummer in our books!