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Kitchen remodel: What to move where in odd angled space

Barb Chamberlain
2 years ago

Calling on all the design geniuses I see posting here!


We moved in knowing we'd have to remodel this kitchen/eating space. Household of 2 and this is the last house we’ll buy. We're designing for ourselves for the long run, not for resale, and expect to be here another 2-3 decades. This means we’re thinking about long-term accessibility; although neither of us needs universal design at this point we don’t want to design in a way that makes it extra costly to make those changes in future if needed.


It's a relatively big space (~15x15), poorly utilized. I cook and bake from scratch, preserve/can foods, and we enjoy cooking together occasionally. We don’t need a big entertainment space--if/when the world returns to that kind of scenario it’s so rare for us that we’re not designing for that.


At this point I want to do the planning to get the bones of the space right. I’m collecting ideas for finishes and will get to that later.


Biggest issues:

- The odd angles in 3 corners leave a lot of wasted space and create conflicts between the oven door/adjacent drawers and the stove hood/adjacent cupboards. The one that’s the back side of the front hall closet also leaves a very funny unusable angle space inside the closet good only for leaning an umbrella.

- No landing zone by the fridge and pantry, which are right next to each other. They’re by the entry into the house from the garage, which is where all groceries come in. This also puts the coffee station (in its logical spot by the sink) a long way from the half-and-half; it’s the little things that get to you after a while and we’re both working from home and consuming coffee all day.

- The pantry is tall, dark, and deep. My last pantry was a lighted walk-in and I loved it. I don't need a walk-in but this one pretends to have more usable space than it actually provides.

- Long counter between sink and stove looks like great workspace but actually means a lot of walking back and forth during meal prep.

- Silly cupboard over fridge is impossible to reach--a waste of space.

- "Window" spaces into living room and hallway have sills our cat jumps onto. From there he can launch onto the dining table and he's leaving claw marks on the wall texturing. We also prefer a more open floor plan and this broken plan feels really pointless and crowds the table in the eating space. These windows need to go away.

- Lower cupboard under sink is rotted out and I want drawers instead of cupboards below anyway. Consider all cupboards expendable.


We’ve left the adjacent front hall closet and laundry room without doors and the laundry room has no shelving for now to have maximum flexibility for the remodel. The laundry room has its own conflict between the dryer door and the door into the garage. That’s a lower priority but needs to be fixed at some point and perhaps gets worked into the kitchen solution.


Additional things I want to end up with:

- Extra-deep 30” counters

- An appliance garage or space inside the pantry with outlets or some other good way of having easy access to frequently used small appliances without having them sitting out on the counters (even with the deeper counters--I hate the clutter)

- Some open shelves or doing away with some of the upper cabinets; it feels very closed in and my last kitchen had some open shelving that I made great use of


Potential changes I’ve thought about in rough order of simplest to most complex below. What would maximize functionality without doing things that won’t really create much gain?


Option 1: Move stove around to its right to the north wall at a reasonable distance from the sink so I have workspace on both sides of the stove and get rid of The Clash of the Cupboards. Create landing zone counter next to laundry room door and shift fridge into current pantry space. Create pantry shelving in laundry room to replace lost pantry space. Replace lower cupboards with drawers and generally make better use of potential storage space in the kitchen proper. Cut those interior wall windows down to the floor to open up to living room/hallway and eliminate the kitty's play spaces. Maybe put a Murphy door on the laundry room for additional pantry space. Drawbacks: Stove and dishwasher right next to each other seems kind of weird.


Option 2, bigger changes: Use part of the front closet space to eliminate that pointless angle wall; put the fridge over there so it's closer to the sink and coffee station. Could close the existing door opening from the hallway, shift that to where the current "wall window" is, for more space to work with although the front hall is kind of narrow and this would exacerbate that. I thought about moving the dishwasher to the right of the sink (we’re both right-handed); that likely means shifting the sink left a bit and that would center it under the window, which is aesthetically nice but non-essential. Fridge will be replaced by one with freezer on bottom so conflicts between dishwasher door and fridge door wouldn’t occur that often, but still need to be considered. Move the stove and cut the wall windows to the floor as described above. Create the landing zone countertop entering from laundry room. Do a better job with the pantry space to create a baking/storage zone from pantry to stovetop/oven, potentially an appliance garage inside or next to the pantry. (Not opposed to having separate cooktop and oven but I’ve never had that, don’t know that I gain enough to be worth the added cost.)


Option 3, even more structural changes: All of the above plus eliminate the angle where the stove currently is completely by going into the garage (it’s okay to take that space) if that really makes it easier to create the necessary storage and workspace, but we’d have to build the supporting floor because the garage is down a couple of steps. Take out more of the walls into the living room on either side of the current window opening if possible. I don’t know if that’s a bearing wall but it’s likely. If so, I’d create functional bookshelf walls with appropriate reinforcing to make better use of the space since I have a big cookbook collection to house. Or really go for it, take the entire front closet and just work from the front door in to create a nicer entry while we're at it and move closet function to laundry room, but that's probably beyond our budget to rework that much.


The no-furniture pix are from the real estate listing. Rendering is my husband's scale drawing. I wish I could include his mutterings about the odd angles and difficulty of measuring this space.










Thanks for any and all ideas!

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