buffalotina, The laminate is holding up well... so far no scratches or any other complaints. LOVE the Aura paint! We used it to paint the entire house. The cabinets are painted with Aura Satin and the walls in Matte. I'm very pleased with the Aura paint so far... It's holding up well and any spills wipe up nicely. We primed with the Benjamin Moore Fresh Start, Stain Block primer (waterbased). Their primer was more expensive but went on smoothly and coated much more like a oil based primer, so we felt it was worth the $$$. I have to say that painting the cabinets was a LOT of work! Honestly, more work then I expected. I was also pretty burnt out on painting at that point, as we had just painted every wall, ceiling and trim piece in the house. We sanded before the each coat... and it probably took between 2 and 3 coats to get them perfectly smooth with good thick coverage. I was lucky to have my mom helping, she has painted many cabinets and is quite an experienced painter. It was worth the work in our case, because I didn't want to pay $$$ to have them sprayed... One other thing I noticed about the Aura paint... it stays a little sticky for about a month (only notiecable on the shelves). We painted fire place mantle and built-ins with it too. I asked at the store and they said the Aura takes 30 days to fully cure. So just an FYI if you're painting any shelves.

Just as in FYI, all measurements should be labeled so we don't have to count boxes to try and figure out the dimensions. We need the width of each wall/door/doorway/window and the distances b/w each wall/door/doorway/window. Yours is a little easier to "count boxes" b/c the scale is an easy one - 1 box = 1'x1', so it's not so bad. Some questions: What does the entire first floor look like? Is there a separate DR or is this going to be the only eating space. One of the reasons I'm asking is that while banquettes are nice, they can become a bit more difficult to use as we age, so it would not be my first choice in this case. What is the room on the left ("under" the pantry and to the left of the refrigerator)? Could you steal a couple of feet from that room for the kitchen? Can the water and gas be moved? Right now, there is no workspace or real emergency landing space b/w the range and sink - far from ideal. If there is a basement or crawl space, both should be relatively easy and inexpensive to move; if on a slab, it's both more difficult and more expensive. Here is a link that might be useful: FAQ: How do I ask for Layout Help and what information should I include? This post was edited by buehl on Thu, Sep 4, 14 at 0:09

Thanks for the ideas and questions. Sorry it has taken me so long to respond. I’m reworking my plan and really trying to take Marcolo’s ice-water-stone-fire into consideration while doing it. I’m probably not going to be able to do much more work on this until after Thanksgiving. I will probably start a new discussion with my new layout sometime after the holiday. I’ll post a link here when I do so, hopefully, you all will pop into the new discussion and give me more of your great insights. Individual responses to you all, below. I fear my responses sound argumentative but I don’t mean them that way. I just don’t understand where you are coming from and possibly need more clarification to help me see what I’m missing. Thanks again: hollysprings said: It's confusing as to what area is ''kitchen''. Is it the laundry area? If so then more than half of your appliances arent actually in the kitchen. Is it the area at the top right? Same thing. You've got stuff that you need that isn't where you need it. Either way, I don't think that takng down the wall is doing you any favors if it leaves the whole house so ill defined. @hollysprings: Right now the laundry room is just a big catch-all room which also tends to collect clutter (which drives me batty) and traffic route. If I had a use for the extra space in the laundry area, it would make sense to keep it but I don’t. I don’t sew or do any crafts that would require me sitting in a separate room to do. At 8X16 it's really just a big, wide hallway that is almost as big as my cramped 15.5x10.5 kitchen (see photo in one of my posts above). So it makes more sense to me to eliminate the big hall and put that space in the kitchen where I need more of it. Or do you mean the wall we’re taking down in the picture above, between kitchen and dining room? I don’t understand why that’s not a good thing. The kitchen is too small to expand or make many changes to the current layout, feels cramped, and the dining room is too small to be very useful either. It seems that I then just have two rooms that both function poorly. What am I missing? ---- aloha2009 said: Have you considered removing the entry wall also, since semi-imposing on access to the front door would happen only when you are seating a full 12 people (3-4x/year), I think that would open up some options for you. It would really open up the entryway, unless you are against that. I'm not sure why you are against having your stove be a focal point. Many, many,kitchens make the stove/vent the focal point which looks great! My current kitchen the frig is the focal point. I've yet to find one kitchen pic with that. I understand your love of your windows. I personally am going to add 8-12' of new windows in our kitchen into our medium sized kitchen. With or w/o the new windows I have a functioning kitchen. There's give and take in any kitchen remodel. @aloha2009: I’m not fond of removing the entry wall. I really dislike front doors that just open into the house itself without some kind of separation from living and entry areas. I’d also like to avoid that because I really like the original wood used on the entry side of that wall. It would make me sad to see it go. The prior owners already removed too much of it as it is, imho. I could make the stove/hood the focal point or I could have nice, lighted cabinets in that same location that show off some of my fun collection of serving pieces, pitchers, and my colorful “in-between” dishes. If I have a choice, I’d rather have the latter. I’m not big on appliances as focal points in general. I was really striving for more of an “un-kitchen” look, as much as practical while still having a functional layout. ---- laughable said: It will be really helpful to see your plan on graph paper. It would also be helpful if you labeled your graph paper with letters and arrows in reference to the photos taken. Label your photos: A, B, C, etc. Then label the drawings where the pictures were taken with an arrow showing the direction you were looking when you shot the picture. Like this: A---->, B---->, C----> to help us get a better feel for things. : ) I've popped on and off a few times trying to see where your thread might go and to see if I could offer any help. The one thing that comes to mind is to ask if you can put the washer and dryer anywhere else since it seems to be eating a major portion of your kitchen. Can it go where your coat closet is, or in a bathroom, or in a part of a bedroom, or in the basement (and install a laundry chute)? Anywhere but in the kitchen, LOL. We'll be able to help you more with the graph paper version, surely. @ laughable: After T-Day, I’ll work up something like you suggest with photos and such. Thanks for that suggestion. I’m surprised that the laundry area is bothering people so much. I just don’t see it as an issue. I have no place else on this floor to move it. If we put it in the coat closet, we’d have no place for coats and I see no good place to build a new closet. The bathroom isn’t big enough. I LOVE having it there as it’s close to the bedrooms, close to the kitchen where I spend a fair amount of time, so I never have any laundry piling up. If I moved it in the basement, it would be inconvenient and I know I’d keep forgetting to move the laundry along. Plus, it would mess up the Man Cave. Except for more pantry storage, which I don’t really need, I don’t see what else I would even use that space for. I mean, I guess some of the stuff I do now have in a cabinet in the basement could come up to a pantry area there but this is stuff I seldom use or things like the huge package of Costco paper towels which, because I don’t use them much, takes me about two years to go through. I’m just not convinced that the convenience of having seldom used items closer to kitchen outweighs the huge inconvenience of hauling laundry up/down stairs. Plus, I am in my late 50’s and we hope to age-out here. Carrying the laundry up/down may not be as easy when I’m 80 as it is now. Or maybe doing that will help keep me young, lol. If it helps, we are planning on putting a counter over w/d and then adding some louvered, bi-fold doors to cover the front. Does covering them up help make you more comfortable with placement?

The first plan is better because the area between counters is greater. On paper it probably looks huge to you, but the average woman moves 26" with every step, so the distance from one side to the other is 3 steps. Three feet is the minimum width for a corridor so two people would have to turn sideways if they met in one of these narrow corridors.